


the healing place

by waywarddays



Series: folks in their twenties with umbrellas [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (Comics), The Umbrella Academy (TV), The Umbrella Academy (TV) RPF
Genre: Child Neglect, Childhood Trauma, F/F, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Healthy Relationships, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Other, Psychological Trauma, Unhealthy Relationships, everybody got fucked up because of reginald, time for hugs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:21:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26256307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waywarddays/pseuds/waywarddays
Summary: Trauma sucks, especially when it's associated with a bunch of emotionally-stunted twenty-year-olds with superpowers.Or;You've had a rough day. Fortunately, you're in a New York mansion in which rough days are fairly commonplace, so you've got a good range of support available to you from the Hargreeves siblings.
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves/Reader, Ben Hargreeves/Reader, Diego Hargreeves/Reader, Klaus Hargreeves/Reader, Luther Hargreeves/Reader, Vanya Hargreeves/Reader, five hargreeves/reader
Series: folks in their twenties with umbrellas [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1907551
Comments: 48
Kudos: 91





	1. children, children

**Author's Note:**

> pref. : children, children
> 
> Five and Diego manage to involve you in one of their fights. It doesn't go down well. 
> 
> You take a shower.

You’d always struggled with the quiet. It filled all the cracks and empty spaces, suffocating a room out of use or drowning out corners of storage closets until you couldn’t stand to use them anymore; the buzzing uncertainty in it, the tendency to preempt something awful happening, followed it around, and you’d found yourself, since you were four or five years old, scrubbing the silence out of the places you used the most only in order to tolerate being on your own. 

When you couldn’t have company — and that was more often now than it had ever been, now that you worked eight hours in a coffee shop which, given the pandemic, required only one service worker, and since you’d moved out of your parents’ house about a year ago — you’d find anything to connect the gaps in conversation. You’d had complaints filed in long strings to your new apartment after the first few weeks because you hadn’t yet shaken the habit of blasting music at all hours of the day, something you’d once been able to do with little trouble seeing as your folks weren’t home all that often; so you’d resorted instead to the radio, or to singing, or even to talk to yourself. You’d make lists out loud or remind yourself of your times' tables. Anything to stop the inhibiting breath of quiet.

—

Since you’d met the Hargreeves, much of the sound you were used to had come back into your life. After they’d resolved the not-insignificant issue of the apocalypse, they’d settled back into regular life (or as regular of a life as they could have, now that they were internationally-acclaimed pseudo-terrorists with superpowers), and Vanya’s part in that life, it had seemed, was to enrol in a university on the outskirts of New York and begin to study music in a professional sense. It was in those classes — the classes that you, a Liberal Arts major, had taken for extra credit — that you’d met her, sweet and shy and strangely complex, and from there, your relationship with her, and the rest of her family, had unravelled.

You’d heard of the Hargreeves, or at least the Umbrella Academy, before, but you weren’t massive on the comic books so you wouldn’t have been able to put a name to a face had Vanya not been recognised by another customer when she’d come into your coffee shop on your first shift to express a best-friend-level of support for your new job. She’d smiled, waved it off, shaken a couple of hands, and looked back on you, one eyebrow flattened as if to ask you, “Does this change your opinion of me?” — and it hadn’t, not really, but you’d been upset for a while that she had waited so long to tell you.

“I’m sorry,” She’d said to you, sounding vaguely panicked, when you’d turned away from her to pull on one of the coffee machines. They weren’t the most reliable of things. “I just didn’t think you would care, or mind, or whatever.”  
“Vanya, of course I don’t mind. Why would I?” 

You’d never found out if she’d seen through the little smile you gave her that day, but a few months later (about eight months ago to you, now), a very loud argument, paired with her erratic levitation of some of the things in your small apartment downtown, and the tears which resulted had led to her pulling you awkwardly into the Academy by hand one day, talking to override her nervousness. 

“So, Klaus, he’s not… No. He’s fine. But he’s odd. And so is Diego. Actually—“ She’d cut herself off, spinning back to you to face you in the great expanse of the mansion’s lobby. From the outside, it hadn’t looked nearly as big, and you stared at the chandelier overhead, dripping with crystals and spinning, slightly, suggesting a draft which you suspected would be common in big houses like these. “—they’re all really weird. I have yet to discover if it’s a superpower thing or an abusive father thing. The point is, they’re all odd, and they won’t be normal when they meet you, and chances are they’ll be suspicious of you, but they’re harmless. Mostly.”  
“‘Mostly’?” You repeated, brow quirked, concerned. She smiled crookedly, glancing back the central mass of staircase behind the pair of you.   
“I won’t let them hurt you.”

And so the string quartet had filed in. You’d spent a good day with them, all things considered, sleeping over in Vanya’s old shoebox of a room (after having found out about how she’d been treated by her father, the size of it made sense, and it made you wish you had known her when you were younger so that you could befriend her) and meeting the rest of the siblings at staggered intervals. They’d each had their own peculiar charm — and they’d each been equally sceptical of your intentions with Vanya, which, though she apologised profusely for it, hissing things in Russian at Five when he had startled you with a glare and a well-placed spatial jump, you took as a good sign. At least there were members of this family who did care for Vanya. You could put up with that no problem.

So it became a solution to both of your problems — you wanted noise after a long shift, and faced with the prospect of walking home in the dark to an empty apartment with the lights off, you came instead to the Academy most evenings, offering in exchange takeaway for Ben and Klaus and French language support for Vanya, whose lack of understanding of French and yet perfect pronunciation of Russian would never cease to amaze you. Over time, you grew closer to each of the members, a classic case of sticking around until they missed you when they were gone: and things were normal.

—

But today had been rough.

As you paced down the streets towards the Academy — it was only as you crossed the junction a few streets down from the one it sat in the middle of that you realised you’d been heading there at all, considering on Mondays you’d usually just go right home — you placed both thumbs on your temples and squeezed inwards, trying to keep your breathing stable. 

The crowd was thick and motionless as the light began to recede, but you picked your way through the spaces you could find, trying to ignore the buzzing threat of being alone with your thoughts that hung like a haze overhead, over the interlacing webs of conversation, of street-side arguments and business calls. It wasn’t always there, and you didn’t always feel it — the pressure of loneliness was the one thing you couldn’t stand but, since moving into a new environment in which you’d been forced to make friends, and especially since you’d grown closer with the members of the Academy, the times at which you felt it had begun to grow further and further apart each time, until you had suddenly been made aware, a few weeks ago, that you were firmly on the path to recovery.

Trauma, you found, clung to you wherever you went. It haunted the places where nobody else would go, the spaces in your house which you didn’t allow other people into — in the first few weeks after moving out of your folks’ place when the street outside had sounded unfamiliar and distant, you’d slept on your couch because you couldn’t stand the padded silence of your own bedroom. That part of you had seemed to have healed; but there were moments, especially after a particularly bad day, that it would return to you all at once, and because you were, according to your therapist, ‘better', you weren’t confident in your ability to deal with it anymore. 

The day had been long, and hard. Everyone you’d met had seemed to aggress you: in your classes, there had been the usual group of antagonists, except you had woken up badly and had already had a bad start, and since Vanya hadn’t been in, today, you’d been on your own in dealing with it; and after your morning classes, you’d headed to work into a foray of middle-aged women asking to see your manager. In the spaces between the frustration and the disappointment and the lectures by your superiors, you’d heard it — the clattering forthcoming of quiet, the spiralling of your brain inside your own head. It was always going to end in disaster. 

As you traced your way towards the doors of the Academy where they were set into the opposite side of the street, you narrowly avoided a cyclist and pressed your hands over your ears when he cursed back at you. 

Your brain had a nasty habit of reciting your worst experiences to you when you were already low, and it had begun to do it by now, while you focused on weaving through the foot traffic and getting to the short staircase leading inside. 

Today was a terrible day.

—

You opened the door into noise.

From the lobby, as you dropped your work bag and the plastic-bag-full of Chinese onto the marble just around the side of the doorway, you could hear Five shouting about something from the at-home bar, and wondered, distantly, slightly relieved that you could hear anything at all, if he had been drinking and was back on the time travel explanation he tried to give to Luther once every fortnight when you heard Diego yell something back at him. They had this quality about them that made them sound like they were arguing even when they were merely discussing something, so you turned away from it, unworried but panicked by the aggression, and tried to shut the anger in it out so that you could enjoy it only as a frazzled white noise.

Instead, you turned your attention to the stairwell, slinging your coat over the table in the centre of the room which held the great growing bed of flowers. Hearing the door, it was regular for Vanya to have come down to greet you, or at least for Klaus to have been summoned by the scent of food, but there was nobody. Not even Grace had emerged from the kitchen to say hello. 

“That’s what I’m telling you, you imbecile,” Five barked as you ventured gingerly into the Commons. The great, pronged deer mount loomed just over Five’s head from his position crouching on the white stone fireplace, eyes narrowed at Diego, knives in hand, teeth gritting. Allison, arms folded, looked unimpressed from a nearby window, and Klaus and Vanya stood, a little perturbed—looking, off to the side. Ben, undeterred, lay on the couch reading, and he was the only one to spare you a glance as you walked in.

You waved, managing a small smile. You wondered how bad you truly looked, because he returned the gesture, but the regular friendly smile he’d worn was swept aside quickly by concern. 

Instead of catching the group’s attention, you just headed for the sink for a glass of water. While you were there, you reached for the overhead cabinet and took a supply of Five’s aspirin. You weren’t going to deal with whatever this was, today — all you wanted to do was go upstairs, hide in the spare room and play one of those relaxing music compilations on Youtube to fall asleep.

“Don’t call me an imbecile.”  
“I’m calling you that because that’s what you are, you imbecile,” As you turned to lean against the counter, swigging back the pills and some water, you watched him blink in and out of existence, reappearing, some would say symbolically, over the urn which had carried Reginald Hargreeves’ ashes. “She’s not good for you, Diego. She works with the Commission. She heard you offer her a place in the family and she chose to steal what could have been our only way home—!”  
“I was in the Commission, man! I know what it’s like, it isn’t all bad—“  
“An organisation that forced me to assassinate innocent people under the threat of returning me to the apocalypse isn’t bad?”  
“No, I didn’t mean it like that.“  
“Listen,” Five leant down, almost pressing his nose against Diego’s forehead. You could tell it bothered him that Five, standing where he was, was taller than him. “You can think with your dick all you want. All I’m saying is that when she shows up here, one day, you’d better find her before I do because if I get to her first, you’ll be lucky if you can get your ass down here fast enough to save her life.”

“Woah, okay!” Klaus intervened, throwing up both arms to separate them a little. Five stalked off in your direction, and, realising finally that you’d arrived, sent you a little glare. It wouldn’t have normally worried you — Five could be like that when he was angry, still a petulant child at heart even if he had consciously aged — but you’d had too many of those thrown your way today, and it made an ice-cold discomfort sink into your stomach. You flattened closer to the counter in an attempt to stay out of sight of the others, especially because Diego, enraged, had thrown a knife off to join another one he must have left before in the mounted head of an ox. 

(At least you thought it was an ox. Some of the décor in this place made you wonder if Reginald even came from Earth to begin with.)

“So what we’re not gonna do, Five, Diego, is argue about a girl. Have you never heard the phrase ‘bros before hoes’? Those are words to live by, my friends, got me through a couple of sticky situations, let me tell you.”

“Klaus, I don’t think you’re helping,” Ben warned quietly. He hadn’t gotten up to join the others in the commotion, but he’d done as much as put his book down. You could feel him glancing nervously at you from time to time and made a point of ignoring it. You weren’t going to bring up your own problems in the midst of a potentially-lethal midday brawl between brothers.

Honestly, you weren’t even sure why you were still watching this. Your body hurt. You wanted to be in bed.

“Yeah, you’re really not, man, so why don’t you just take off and go get high somewhere, huh?” Diego snarled. Klaus raised his arms, whistling.

“Wow, low blow.”

“Whatever,” He seethed, frustrated. He tucked away his knives, which ordinarily would be a good sign, but you could see Five out of the corner of your eye, fingers crackling with blueish energy. “She’s my girlfriend.”

“Ex-girlfriend,” Luther added unhelpfully. You ducked under the glare Diego threw him, wincing.

“Whatever. I don’t need your input, Five, okay?”

“Oh, like you didn’t need my input when you almost triggered the end of the world?” 

You tensed, sucking in a tight breath. 

The end of the world would have been a sore point for many people — that was if they’d have known it was happening — but, like them, you’d only found out after the disaster had been narrowly avoided (twice, technically, but you weren’t mentally strong enough to wrap your head around the logistics of that). It wasn’t a great feeling, to begin with, for anyone, to know that you could’ve been wiped out at any moment without knowing it, because of someone else’s family feud, no less, and that was enough to deal with by itself. What had gotten you, though, was that April 1, 2019, the date it was scheduled to happen in the Commission’s books, had been the day after you’d moved out of your parents’ house after the last argument you’d had. You had left without saying a word to them, enacting plans you’d been working on for a year or so prior to that. 

They weren’t brilliant, the source of a lot of difficulty in your life, but you would never have seen them again, and to think that your family members would have left the world thinking that there was no other family left who loved them, that hurt you to your core. There was definitely a midlife crisis thing to deal with for a few days after that, and now, even if you were still too nervous to speak to them again in person, you checked up on them via mutual family friends. You weren’t going to make that mistake again, not on your life.

Five had known that was a trigger, and the room around you shuddered as if taking a terse breath inwards. A painful lump began to form in your throat. You could feel your heart in your ears. The seconds of silence which followed stretched out, long and unforgiving, and you were reminded of that time in the dark, where everything seemed to be collapsing inwards —

“So.”

You startled. Five had spoken from behind your ear, and he punctuated the word by slapping his hands against your shoulders, crouching on the bar counter behind you. Before you could stop yourself, you could feel a tight, hot heat building behind your eyelids, and squeezed your fists shut, digging crescents into your palms with your nails to avoid crying in front of the seven people left in your life who hadn’t seen it happen before.

“Let’s ask somebody without a vested interest. (y/n). A pleasure having you over, by the way, sorry that you had to walk in during this little engagement we’ve got going on, but we do need your help.”

You didn’t have to be looking to see the eyes in the room turn to you. A little commotion at the corner of your eye let you know that this time, Ben had gotten up to tend to you, but it was too late — panic, like a rug unfurling, reached its fingers into your very nerve endings. You found yourself unable to talk, so you didn’t affirm, just stood, vaguely mortified at the prospect of getting involved in this particular fight. You’d known a little about the Lila debacle, but not a lot, and you’d wanted to keep it that way — you figured that if Diego had wanted to tell you about his complicated history with romance, he would, and this, certainly, was not him consenting to this information being spread.

“Do you happen to think my ‘input', as you called it,” He gestured over your shoulder to Diego, who had fixed you in a stare. It wasn’t threatening, necessarily, but its unreadability, to you, was more terrifying. You could feel yourself running out of time to get out of this situation. “is important? Because I happen to think I can be very useful in certain situations including but not limited to preventing the apocalypse and also my brothers and sisters, including the man of the hour himself, from getting killed by time-crazy warmongers.”

“Hey, guys, maybe you shouldn’t be involving (y/n) in a personal issue like this?”

You dared to look up at Vanya from where she’d spoken across the room. She was doing that stilted ‘are you okay’ thing she sometimes did, concerned from a distance — she’d reached a hand out towards you and you wanted to curl up and sleep somewhere far away from here, with a pleasant background buzz to put you under.

You’d only been after water and painkillers.

“Seriously, guys, cut it out,” Ben hissed, then turned to you, hands cautioning as he tried to reason a smile at of you. “Sorry about them, you know how they can get—“

Diego cut through the noise, still staring, fixated. “No, I’m interested to know.”

“And so am I, what a coincidence. (y/n)? My judgement: good or bad? Considering that without me — and I want all of you to listen to this, including you, my lovely lady —“ He patted your shoulders and you shrank under the confirming weight of his hands. “—without me, you’d all not only be scattered throughout time with no hope of seeing your families again, but you’d also be dead!”

To be dead.

What a deeply tragic branch on the tree of possibility.

“Oh, shit,” Klaus said under his breath, rolling his head back. It was only touching your face that you realised you’d started crying.

“You guys are such fucking assholes.” Ben snarled. “It’s fine, hey, we’re sorry—“ He had made it up to the counter but you stepped away from his outstretched hands, edging, too, out of Five’s grip even as it loosened on your shoulders. 

You didn’t want to be close to any of them right now, not when you felt as low as this. Everything, once again, felt dark, devoid of purpose. The long, slow stretch of thoughts had fogged over and you imagined yourself looking forward into an endless patch of desert, enveloped in mist the thickness of a liquid. 

“Don’t treat me like a child,” You snapped, but you could hear it in your voice. There wasn’t even any real anger to it — instead, you just sounded desecrated. Your head hurt more now than it had done when you’d come in trying to cure the pain. “Don’t talk to me like I don’t know what’s going on. This is your house, you can argue if you want to, but I don’t want to be dragged into your fights. All I wanted was water.”

You shifted back towards the sink. Five got out of your way and you didn’t look at him, just took the glass and the rest of the packet of painkillers and then made your way back out into the lobby. The quiet was tense, silent, unmoving. At this point, you were too tired to get out your headphones to ward it off, so instead you listened to it play as you started to ascend the stairs, bags slung over your arm in exhaustion.

“Vanya, I’m borrowing your shower.” You called back. You didn’t wait for a response.


	2. i. vanya

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You talk to Vanya about your trainwreck of a day, and the pair of you bond over your shared distaste for tourists and emotional neglect and invalidation caused by your respective parents. 
> 
> Also, you both listen to Girl in Red.

By the time you emerged from her bathroom, your low-key playlist thrumming along in the background, a borrowed towel over your hair and another wrapped around you like a sarong, Vanya had already joined you in her room. She had settled with a book in the armchair in its far corner — her room had always been an odd shape, sort of triangular at the edges, and the strategic positioning of that armchair to box part of the layout off had been her solution to what she referred to as ‘the weird corner’ — and as you stepped out from the steam onto the carpet, she glanced up from her reading, managing a smallish smile, the sort she reserved for when she was nervous or working up to saying something. 

When you’d first met Vanya, during the first year of university, when you’d been allocated a dormitory together, you had been amazed and perturbed by her ability to appear; she was always so very careful not to create noise that often she produced more of a disturbance than if she’d announced her forthcoming like the rest of your dormmates, and when you looked up from a task, now, you always expected her to be standing over you, waving shyly, perhaps just smiling. Now, you were used to it. You had grown accustomed to her uncanny ability to materialise and had suspected she’d probably followed you up, always raring to make amends as quickly as possible — you didn’t startle.

Normally, you would have prompted her to get whatever was on her mind off of it, but your muscles sagged with exhaustion, now. All you wanted to do was get dressed into the change of clothes you’d brought with you and curl up, asleep, on one of the long couches in the hall, the early shift you had scheduled tomorrow be damned.

So the quiet remained. It was abated, slightly, by the melodramatic love song still playing from your phone from the bathroom (you really needed to stop letting Allison play with your Spotify account), but it was there, humming uncomfortably in the background, and you could feel the tension rise once again in your abdomen and the back of your neck. In some depth of your chest, you scolded yourself for reacting this way — it was your right to be a little pissed, after all, and you weren’t committing some great sin by not talking after the trainwreck of a day you’d just gone through — but deeper down, the little, fox-eared dragon that lived under your heart smoked out your rationality from the equation until the panic had risen, all-encompassing, once again. 

“I was wondering,” Vanya said, just as you were about to spiral. “if I could practice while you’re here, maybe? I’ve, um, got a concert coming up pretty soon.”

You considered it for a moment as you dried your hair, the low, soft drag of a 90s ballad playing somewhere back in the mist. The suggestion softened you. She did this well, almost as well as Klaus did — pretending to be doing something for her when she was, in fact, doing it for someone else.

She was the only member of the family you’d trusted with the knowledge that you were, deeply and terribly, afraid of silence, following a long, cold night in the Computer Lab at school, when she’d returned from a bathroom break to find you curled on the floor, fiddling anxiously with the wiring of your headphones. She’d never quite extricated from you the exact reason, but it was almost like she didn’t need it — you were upset by the prospect of quiet, and as a musician with a moderate self-assurance of her own skill, the solution, to her, was obvious. If you were lucky, you’d walk through the doors of the Academy some nights with the low, floaty sounds of an aria coming at you from the open door to her bedroom, settling overhead the lobby; on those days, you’d make tea for the both of you and on your way up to practice French past papers with her, you’d let the stiff breath, always held somewhere in your throat, out. All sound was good, but Vanya’s put you at ease, so while your nerves tonight were overworked, you couldn’t bring yourself to say to her ‘play something gentle’ in a tone which might inhibit her natural creativity. 

Instead, still holding your towel up, you went to turn your music off, and, offering her a grateful look when you reappeared, agreed quietly.

Vanya’s music was deeply beautiful. She played, this evening, out into the small stretch of balcony attached to her room and into the street beyond, turned around enough that you’d be able to get changed in privacy. Even listening to it as a person behind the intended stage, though, it really was something to behold. You were amazed that she’d gone as long as she had done without becoming First Chair in her ensemble, though you supposed, again, that that had been the work of a shitty childhood. Shrugging on one of her old shirts (this one said SHE-RA, PRINCESSES OF POWER on it in bold, faded lettering, and you resisted the urge to call her a nerd), you sat yourself down on the edge of her bed and watched her articulate the notes against the stretch of strings, hands deft at work, eyes closed. Perhaps it was because of her powers, or perhaps she was just that good, but she seemed to feel every sound she made, as if the notes, gentle and airy in the half-light of the evening, were wrenched out of her very soul.

As the piece came to a slow finale, you couldn’t help that the piece was so equivalent to her — the final notes, like a breath drawn in before speaking, did not descend into the street but instead rose, cutting through the dark with practised ease.

“Thanks,” You said to her, a little lamely, after she’d finished, when she was in the process of laying her violin back in its case. She never accepted thanks, but she instead offered you that shy smile again, the one with the lilting faded look to it, and gestured awkwardly to a tray she’d set on the table beside the weird-corner-chair. 

“I, uh, made tea.”

So that was how you ended your Monday night; lying beside Vanya, the almost-cause of the apocalypse (twice, technically), on the panelled flooring of her balcony, head close to the glass fencing so you could look up at the stars, a wispy mug of fancy tea curled under one arm. It wasn’t quite far enough into winter to be cold, yet, but you had wet hair, so you’d had the foresight to drag one of her comforters out with you, and had laid it over your legs where they stuck into the room slightly.

(It was an NYC balcony. No matter how wealthy a person was, you doubted there were many who would be able to acquire one with enough room to fit a full person at length.)

You talked for some time. Something she’d said had got you giggling, and after it had died down, she said,

“Bad day?” And then, elaborating (you could hear the sympathetic creases around her eyes), “I’m guessing it wasn’t just Five and Diego that upset you.”

You turned your face up, blinking up at the stretch of sky overhead. The light pollution made it almost impossible to see the stars during the summer but, with the descent of the winter season, they flickered faintly in amongst the peaks of the taller buildings, winking as clouds passed them by. It wasn’t something you normally had the time to look at and it struck you that this was an ethereal sort of moment, the kind that people wrote about in the lull between the conflict and its resolution. 

“Yeah, bad. Could you tell?” You joked softly. She huffed a gentle laugh and patted your arm. You felt the tension ease and settled back a little so you were more comfortable, wriggling around a wayward screw sticking up out of the planks under your back.

“You looked pale when you came in. I didn’t want to call out to you in case I drew attention to you in the middle of the fight, but I think that was a mistake.”

“It wasn’t. I appreciated it. I think Ben had the same idea.” 

You thought of Ben and Vanya as a pair. Historically, you knew, they were the empathetic ones — the others had always had their own ambitions, fears which got in the way of protecting their siblings (even, unbelievably, Five, who seemed so dedicated to his family), but the two of them had been the emotionally-mature ones throughout their lives, sitting down with their siblings when they needed a shoulder to cry on or just being there if they were needed. You imagined Vanya would be the sort to volunteer to pay for something that was broken by someone else just to avoid a fight, and Ben, if a little more cynical (you imagined that was the influence of Klaus), would probably do the same. The thought that the two of them had noticed that you were upset when the others hadn’t warmed you somewhat, from a place a long way inside you.

A long moment had passed. In the dark, the stars and the lights of helicopters were almost indistinguishable. Both of them blinked in the breeze.

“I think that was the first time I’ve seen you cry, actually.” Vanya said carefully. You exhaled, long. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

You sighed and reached for her hand, which she took without hesitation. Vanya’s fingers were always cold, but today they were warmed by the cup of tea she had been holding, so you let her curl two of them around yours, and, softened by the intimacy of the action, as if you’d known each other for years longer than you actually had done, you said, “Kinda.”

“Okay.” She could probably tell you were struggling with how to begin, so she said, only softly, “What happened?”

" Yeah, well,” You said in a harsh breath outwards. You laughed humourlessly and watched a bird, or possibly a bat, flit overhead and disappear into the long shadows on the other side of the street. “It wasn’t even really the argument that upset me at all. I don’t know why I reacted like I did, really, maybe just a build-up of stress. I just wanted some stuff for my headache, and some water, and I’d had a shitty day full of some shitty people, and work and school were pretty bad, and then, I guess, having Five and Diego yelling at me and trying to force me to choose between them…”

“Was it the way they were saying it, or, like, actually what they were saying?” 

“I don’t know,” You ran your free hand across your face, and Vanya squeezed on the one she was holding encouragingly. “Just, I didn’t want shouting, and I really didn’t want to think about dying, or death, or things related to the apocalypse, really. I had a crisis about it once already, you know? It’s one of those things I want to leave behind forever and never have to think about again.”

“Yeah.”

“And I’m sure they didn’t mean any harm or anything, they were just having a petty argument, but I wish they would have, like, read the room, I guess. Even though I know that’s pretty hard for them, Five especially.”

“Five, y’know, he means well, but he can be…”

“…a prick.” You finished, nodding, and she laughed. 

“A prick.” She affirmed. 

Vanya had a way of listening which made you feel heard — you would know, because you did, too, and all your life people had remarked about it with the kind of reverence that showed they didn’t know that it stemmed from experiencing a good amount of emotional neglect. You’d gathered, from the bits and pieces Vanya left about her past for you to find, tucked into her phrasing or the way she spoke about certain parts of her childhood, that she’d gone through her fair share of that can of worms, and you supposed that trait bred that sort of behaviour, to give to a person sharing something with you the wonderful and rare feeling that they were being listened to. 

“So, work?”

“Work.”

“Bad people?”

“You have no idea,” You laughed, and started up your ‘bad day’ spiel. A new business, your little coffee shop down on the very edge of 96th Street, sandwiched between a bagel shop and a barber’s with horrific reviews, wasn’t exactly an easy place to work at. Your manager was constantly stressed, losing her hair in her off time so that each time you saw her (more and more rarely, lately, since work ‘at corporate’, or at her home office, had become busier) you were increasingly reminded of an angry-looking egg, and she’d decided to drop in for an assessment day, which had meant that for the entirety of your six-hour shift, after you’d already needed to put up with the assholes in your History halls, you’d needed to listen to her correct the number of olives you were putting on sandwiches, or how many teacakes you were offering your visitors as freebies. That alone wouldn’t have been problematic were it not for the onslaught of tourists who’d chosen your heaviest workday to come in and peel off complaints about the things you served them; and because your manager was there, hovering, you couldn’t deal with them as you normally would have. You’d left having politely smiled in your one shift for longer than you’d ever needed to collectively in your entire life, and the experience had left a bad taste in your mouth.

You told her about the fail you’d received in a mid-term at school — a story which Vanya only interrupted to curse, because she’d forgotten she would need to make that missed test up tomorrow — and your asshole of a stand-in Art teacher who’d let you know you wouldn’t amount to anything, made worse because he was, by career, a P.E. teacher and only a substitute who knew nothing about the Deschtyle Movement-inspired piece you were working on. You told her about the mature graduate student who’d seen the pride badge on your sweater and called you a slur, and the people who stood around and watched it happen.

Eventually, you’d told her about the headphones.

“They broke,” You said, with a final disappointment. “I’ve been using them for years so I don’t know what I was expecting, but I had to spend the last hour of my shift on my own in silence — because who gets coffee at nine in the evening — and then had to walk home in it, too.”

“I’m sorry,” She said, squeezing again, and it was only then, as you touched your face with two fingers, that you realised you had started to cry. Vanya noticed this and, characteristically, didn’t panic, just kept you close. 

“I’m sorry, I don’t know…” You sniffled, rather pathetically, and when she shifted a little closer, you took the opportunity to curl into her shoulder and cry. It was only when you’d calmed down a bit that she lay a hand on your arm, now half-turned towards her, and asked you what it was that bothered you about it.

“I mean, I think lots of people find sitting in the quiet quite comforting, right? Which is not to say you’re not allowed to be upset about it, but I just— I don’t really get it?” And then supplied, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, though, obviously.”

Ironically, that was what convinced you to tell her. 

“My parents, I think…” Vanya waited patiently as you collected yourself, breathing in a few times to return some of the post-cry oxygen to your lungs. “I think it was probably that that started it, my childhood, I mean. Not to be overly dramatic. But it’s true.”

“They were never really around, my parents. Emotionally, I mean. I’d see enough of them, and there was enough food, and everything, so it could have been a lot worse, but, like, when they were there — more when I was older, really — I just couldn’t tell them anything. I’d say, ‘this thing happened today’, and if it was good, they’d entertain it, but if it was bad, or if it was clearly upsetting me, they’d just write it off, or they’d just outright ignore me.”

You realised that Vanya was wearing her performance blouse only because you were using your spare hand to try and keep your tears from ruining it. You wondered, distantly, if she’d been performing today, and that was why she hadn’t been able to attend classes this morning. 

“I don’t know. It was really invalidating, I guess, constantly being told to calm down or to breathe, or something, or even just being ignored like that. They were trying to condition me to not be so negative, I think, but I think back to it now and that’s probably the reason I’m so scared of being on my own, and of silence and stuff. Those silences between the ends and beginnings of conversations, I can’t stand them. I think I’m trained to associate them with unresolved problems. That sounds really dramatic, but the denial of intimacy, it really fucks with your head.”

“It sounds like a nightmare.” Vanya admitted at your side, her voice a little uncertain, as if she wasn’t sure it was the right thing to say. It was one of the first times you’d heard her react honestly to something — her brain-to-mouth filter was constantly in action, modifying a sentence before it was said to garner the reaction she wanted — but you supposed, laying there beside her, that you were one of the few people who had ever said something emotionally that she related to. 

You laughed waveringly, pulling a hand through your hair, pressing closer to her. She was remarkably soft, everywhere. You were sure she’d be an excellent mother one day — you supposed that was why, from what you’d heard, she’d gotten on so well with Harlan. 

“Yeah, it was.” You paused. “I mean, compared to Doctor Reginald Hargreeves, Child Abuse Wunderkind, it’s probably nothing in comparison, huh.”

“No, don’t gaslight yourself.”(You smiled, internally — the marks of Vanya’s new therapist showed every now and then, and you couldn’t be prouder when they did.) “Like, yeah, but they’re different situations. Because you didn’t have anyone there with you to support you through it. The others aren’t the most emotionally engaged people I know—” You both giggled a little at that. “—but they went through a lot of the same stuff, so we didn’t feel like we were going, y’know, crazy. And there was something comforting about knowing for sure that dad didn’t care, whereas for you, it sounds like you were sort of caught in the middle. Like, you still wanted to tell your parents your problems, and deep down you knew they cared about them, but you didn’t know how.”

How Vanya could be so acutely in tune with people given her background, you had absolutely no idea, and it never failed to surprise you. This was why you came to her so often when you had an issue, and why the others — Five, even — resorted to her when they had no-one else; she listened, and she heard, and she repeated back to you what was bothering you in a way which didn’t make you sound insane. So you yeah’d back at her, feeling a little unmagnificent next to her.

“Dad was — a bastard, but he wasn’t really a dad, either. We knew at a young age that he didn’t care about us as actual individuals, so it wouldn’t matter if we shouted, screamed, kicked, confronted him for it — but if you still love someone, it’s hard to say to them, ‘Hey, this thing that you’re doing, it’s hurting me’, right?”

“Exactly. It’s just invalidating, like, constantly professing your problems to someone, and then even though they’re still hurting you, because your parents say to you that it isn’t a big deal, you also feel stupid for having those feelings in the first place.” You finished. 

“Sounds like a nightmare.” She said, again, as if that was all that could quantify what you were going through. It worked remarkably well. You could hear the crease in her brows in the tone of her voice, and, still sniffling, tucked in closer. If she moved to hold your hand properly, and it perhaps wasn’t as casually intimate as friendly hand-holding might have been, you weren’t about to complain.

Though you knew this conversation was going to happen eventually, you’d expected it to be accompanied by a flood of tears, a lot of breaks, and some emotional gatekeeping if you were particularly unlucky. But you weren’t crying anymore. Instead, it felt as though your problems, though still there, had lost their effect on you — like they were declawed, pawing uselessly at the places they used to tear apart inside you.

“It really sucked.”

“Did you ever talk to them about it?” She asked quietly. “Like, I know it’s hard, but…”

“I mean, I guess. Mostly just by suggesting things, or softening it by making it out to be one of my friends’ problems. I just wanted to see how they’d respond if I brought up the fact that it hurt me, before I actually, y’know, said something. But I shouted at them about it the last time I saw them, before I moved out, now that I’m properly grown, because I’d made this resolution with my friend at the time to give them the what for now that I could, and we haven’t really spoken since.”

It was quiet on the streets, now — as quiet as city streets could be, wrought only with background noise of trucks hissing and dogs barking — but there was no shouting, and the sirens from earlier had died down. A lump had distilled in your throat quite painfully, and you wanted to drink something — but laying with Vanya on her balcony, in the not-quite-warmth of an autumnal evening, you were relatively at peace. 

So when she rose from her place beside you and rolled her shoulders out, shifting so that she was facing you sideways, cross-legged, arms outstretched, you heard it even though you had slung your free arm over your eyes. 

You sat up with her, fingers still interlaced, and quirked an eyebrow at her. She made grabby hands at you, gesturing for a hug, and, giggling-sniffing, you settled into her lap and hugged her, chin on her shoulder, relishing in the radiator-warmth which came off of her.

(Except her hands. They were now ice-cold, and as much as you were enjoying the moment, you had to seriously consider whether or not you were going to squeal and shrug them off of your back, where they rested a little too close to the bare skin between your sweater and your track pants.)

You sat together like that for a moment. You imagined the world around you dematerialising — not in a tragic way, as it would have been if it were the end of the world, or a disappearing act — but in a way which highlighted the importance of all the things you had said and had left unsaid, curled between your two arms and the underside of your jaw. 

Lowly, like a secondary thought to happiness, you realised that you loved Vanya. It was so natural of a resolution, for you, that you didn’t even really need to think about it. Instead, it swelled inside you, blocking out the fox-eared dragon and all the things it was saying, panic-stricken, against the tissues of your chest. 

It no longer mattered, not here.

“So, I can’t really take away your problems,” She said good-humouredly against your shoulder. “But I can offer you something else to think about for a while.”

“Yeah?” You prompted in an attempt to be salacious, even though she definitely hadn’t meant it to sound that way, and you definitely sounded completely ridiculous, still phlegmy and gross while you spoke.

“I can offer you vanilla wafers and The L Word.”

“Done, on the condition that we rewatch Endgame instead.”

“Deal.”

When, later, you were curled up on Vanya’s couch, the quiet sat, watching the pair of you, from the corner, but you didn’t take any notice. Woven together, you giggled over the top of Tom Holland and, when the quiet did, finally, seal, it was pleasant, because you were kissing someone who loved you. 

After you’d parted, she’d pressed her forehead against yours, smiling crookedly, and you’d burst into giggles together, both hands interlaced, in the ruddy yellow light of her bedside lamp and the changing shadows from the TV. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” She’d said to you, grinning.

You believed her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you can't tell, I'm a gay disaster and I love Ellen Page and her beautiful, emotionally-distressed alter-ego, Vanya. Also, for this chapter, I needed to look up 'shows that lesbians love', and I thought you'd appreciate that. 
> 
> I think we're doing Benjamin next... stay tuned! I hope you enjoyed, you lovely people. 🕊


	3. ii. ben

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After your shower, you find Ben; or, rather, he finds you. You talk about being the emotional dumping ground for your families, and, go figure, you end up in a better place because of it.
> 
> Also, you buy some plants (much to Ben's horror).

You emerged from the door in the midst of a crescent-like shape of steam, and, turning your face towards the door, were slightly surprised that you didn’t see Vanya up here with you. You’d expected to walk out to her lounging on her bed, or in her weird-corner chair, or something, and you were prepared to be hurt when you heard the sounds of things rattling downstairs, an odd shudder to the air which alerted you that the fight you’d left downstairs some twenty minutes ago hadn’t yet ended. It must have been, because Vanya was using her powers; and while it didn’t bother you from a self-preservation standpoint anymore (she wasn’t threatening another apocalypse, after all - she was likely just pissed that Five and Diego were making a mess the day after it had been her dishwashing duty), you were still worried for your friend. Free from the shackles of her medication, Vanya sometimes didn’t know when to stop, and while she’d learned to control her powers after therapy and some considerable trial-and-error involving Five and a lot of teleporting out of the way (one such session of which you were unlucky enough to accidentally walk into once), she was much less understanding of the way they affected her mental state. The day after she’d first used it — in your apartment, in the middle of that first and only argument — you’d had to tuck her up on the couch for days. You didn’t want her to exhaust herself. 

But your head hurt. Instead of continuing to worry about it, you slid, in a towel, towards her bedroom door and shut it. You weren’t about to contribute to the cacophony of noise downstairs — which Vanya could well use to hurl a lampshade or something at one of her more unfortunate siblings — with the translucent tunes of 60s swing playing in the background from your phone in the bathroom. 

(Music which was a little clipped by age had always relaxed you, it had been your go-to for your shower so you weren’t held hostage by your head, but the idea that the saxophone in it would be amplified into shockwaves by your irritable companion was a little too much even for you.)

It seemed like a good decision, though, not to involve yourself. After you’d gotten changed, steadfastly ignoring the demons beginning to crowd the recesses of the room around you, in all the places the shadows touched, you shrugged the towel-wrap off of your head, slung it over the door to Vanya’s bathroom and ventured out into the square look-over hallways around the siblings’ bedrooms; and the rattling had stopped. Vanya’s was the first room on the right, and as such was a little shielded from the non-Vanya-related chaos evolving downstairs, but when you’d deemed it safe to come to the edge of the railings overlooking the lobby, you saw Five, wielding what you thought might have been a woman’s hairclip, flash in and out of existence several times around Diego, a little more threatening, but clearly dizzied, with his knife in hand. 

The siblings fought often. You found, these days, that it was mostly Five and Diego who did the actual physical fighting, but emotionally, everyone was a potential victim, and you had learned in your time hanging out with Vanya most evenings that knowing when to duck in and out by the feeling in the room was essential if one wanted to avoid hurt feelings, or possibly a nasty scar. You’d never actually been injured by any of them, but this wasn’t the first time you’d been hurt, and it seemed, each time that one of them would throw something insulting or ugly at you, that it would catch you off-guard no matter what. Vanya, your first friend, the reason you came here so often, mystified you regularly with the pairing of her sweet, shy, careful-looking countenance, and the duality her personality, sometimes rife and aggressive, presented. You were willing to forgive almost everyone for almost anything, but that one had taken a while to recover from, plus a good supply of apology wine and a long, long conversation about boundaries. 

Though, you supposed, that behaviour was probably warranted, given the shitshow of a childhood they’d had collectively. The only one who’d never actually said anything harmful to you was Ben. 

You were interrupted by the sound of a wine glass shattering; you watched the little particles of glass-dust crumble away where it had hit the ground next to the giant plant pot in the centre of the lobby, slung from the Commons, and broken.

“Did I ask for your input, you fucker?” You watched from above as Five blinked his way into the room, tossing a look over his head in half-irritation, half-confusion — given that it was Klaus that followed him in, this was normal.

“Oy, don’t call your older brother a fucker, you fucker.” 

“We’re the same age—”

“No, we’re not. We’ve discussed this before, young man. I,” He gestured to himself with a flourish. “am a sexy charlatan from the Midwest, and you, my wayward son, are simply a follower, tasked with the lifelong task of following— ee-ee-eeh—!”

He trailed off into laughter as — you’d guessed right, it was — Five tossed the hairclip his way, throwing his hands up to guard his temples. It bounced pathetically into his ribcage, but Five looked ready to kill, and as he stormed off, Klaus pulled after him, grinning languidly. He saw you looking down from above, and, waving to you in a way which clarified that he was definitely drunk, he winked, as if the fact that he was ‘just teasing’ Five was a great secret which you’d been made privy to out of fortune of fate. 

The demons that had gathered at the corners of your vision disappeared, and for a moment the panicked stopped. Chaotic though he was, Klaus was a godsend in distracting you. You waved back.

“Klaus—” Ben fell into the room as though he’d stumbled over something, and seethed through his teeth in the direction Klaus had skipped off, “I swear to god, stop antagonising him, or on my life, I will come for you.”

“With what, young squire? Are you going to bukkake me? Don’t you threaten me with a good time.”

“I hate—”

Mid-sentence, he caught sight of you from the rafters, and you laughed wearily, waving at him. He had been in the middle of shouting, but his face softened immediately upon seeing you and he offered you one in return, slightly crooked in the middle, ignoring Klaus as he screeched with laughter and chased off. 

‘I’m coming, just—’ He mouthed at you, and then glanced towards the sound of a bottle smashing. He grinned at you bashfully, held up his hands as if to tell you to wait, and disappeared in a sprint, hesitating over leaving a few times before finally going. 

Smiling, a little warm at the edges, you carried yourself off to his room.

Ben’s bedroom was sparsely decorated, and almost everything he’d had with him as a child came and went fairly quickly. Grace had given him bundles of toys as a kid, he’d told you once, a long time after you’d met, when you were lounging on the couch together, and he’d picked out the seldom few he liked the look of and then toss the rest to his brothers and sisters. He was a sweetheart, but that pickiness remained in later life — he was careful with his company and it had been surprisingly difficult to get close to him, but once you had done, he was startlingly loyal, terrified of the prospect that you might get hurt. 

Even then, you’d only been in his room once before, and that was just briefly, when you’d needed a fresh sweater to get home in after it had rained on your way from work to the Academy. The same stash of hoodies present then was still there now, slung over the hilt of his doorframe (preventing his door, you noted warmly, from ever being closed), and you snagged one before settling under one of his couch throws in front of the flatscreen mounted on the wall, opposite his bed.

(There were some benefits to being a trust fund kid, it seemed, even if it had come with the side effect of needing to resolve the apocalypse with your band of terribly inefficient siblings.)

When Ben did finally emerge, his shirt was ruffled. You had the impression he’d used his powers.

“Hey,” He rushed out, breathless, still glancing out the door until it closed. It was only when he turned back to you, having shut and locked his bedroom door, that he eased into a smile, the sort which reached his eyes and made his whole face younger. “I’m sorry about that.” Ben could be so solemn so much of the time, always so carefully neutral in order to offset the erratic chaos of Klaus and the veritable fury of some of the others, and it was always a lucky thing — you felt — to see him look soft around the edges.

You often had this sense with Ben that he had a soft spot for you. When he looked at you, it was like being observed again after a long time apart, even though it couldn’t have been longer than a few days since you’d last spent time with him — he would lilt into a smile as if to say, ‘You’re back. You were gone for so long.’, and then he’d wrap you up in a hug, or offer you some of the snacks he kept under his bed.

Today was no different. 

“So,” He said, gesturing to his couch as he tramped past. You settled near the armrest further from his bedroom window, already firmly enveloped in one of his hoodies and clutching a book that you’d brought with you to work and hadn’t had time to read. “I’m relatively low on the snack front this week, but I have Skittles and these weird Spanish cookies Allison stole from her last acting gig. Oh, also, I know Klaus took my brownies last week so I could attempt some reconnaissance but knowing him he’s probably found a way to infuse pre-baked goods with weed, so there’s always that risk.”

He held up your two options and you gestured at the Skittles, grinning. “I thought Klaus said he was getting sober?” Ben sighed, tossing you the bag and then grabbing the remote to his TV from his bedside table. 

“When has Klaus ever not been quote-unquote ‘getting sober’?” He said, making dramatic air-quotations to accompany his points as he flopped down on the cushions next to you. You laughed tiredly and slung your legs over his. When you’d first attempted this move, he’d complained and shoved you off — now, he knew better, and did nothing except shift the foot closest to you to make the position a little easier on his knees. 

It was one of those things, you thought, as you tried your best to cover up the fact you were watching him while he picked the appropriate background noise on the TV — one of those things that made the pair of you, to everyone else but yourselves, more than just friends. It was such a simple action, and one you wouldn’t hesitate to do when it came to your actual friend-friends; the intention, though, was different. He never complained anymore. It was an acceptance that you both, deeply, craved physical touch, and felt safer with one another asking for it than with anyone else in your lives.

“Okay, so I’m thinking David Attenborough. Does that work for you?” 

“Of course it works for me, you slut,” You hissed, faux-offended. He dodged a whack easily, snorting. “If I ever refuse Sir David, you need to hit me to remind me of my sins.”

“Uh-huh. So what I’m hearing is you’re giving me permission to hit you.”

“Only under specific circumstances— ow!” You half-laughed, half-complained, ducking under a pillow whose impact the first time around hadn’t actually hurt. 

Eventually, you’d taken to settling down, and stayed like that for a while, though for what amount of time you couldn’t say for sure — ‘Sir David’, as you’d addressed him, talked in low voices about penguins’ swimming behaviours in the background, and the two of you read piled on top of each other on his sofa. This was a common ritual for you. Ben loved to read, filling in the gaps in ‘scheduled family time’ — usually a euphemism for him needing to go downstairs and reconcile whichever two family members had decided it was time to scrap that day — with long reams of books; you, on the other hand, hadn’t discovered it until he’d brought it to your attention as a method of relaxation, and you’d been hooked since. He’d handed you 1984 while you were downstairs teaching Vanya French one day, when you’d asked him what book he’d finished reading, and while you couldn’t recall what the actual story was about, now, you remembered it taking all the tension out of your body, so that the next day’s worth of work had been a breeze. 

Now, whenever you could, you had these little ‘reading sessions’ together. With work and school, you weren’t often available, anymore, but on special occasions, you still found time to set aside for this particular endeavour.

(Although your chill times with Ben weren’t limited to reading. As you’d covered already, your relationship was complicated.)

“This,” You announced after a while, tossing the short novel you were reading — an airport flick you’d picked up on your way to Manhattan to see family, recently — aside, “is terrible.”

Ben squinted a smile at you, feigning sympathy. “Goodness.”

“Got any recs?”

“Say ‘recommendations’, not ‘recs’. You sound like a teacher from the 90s trying to be hip.”

“'Recs’,” You teased at him as he lifted himself, with great effort, apparently, off of the couch and wandered over to the long list of books on his windowsill. He’d needed to start storing them there ever since he’d run out of space on his actual bookshelf, and for his birthday, you’d considered getting him one of those IKEA numbers which could hold just about anything and everything.

Then you’d realised Ben had probably never even been to IKEA. He lived in a multi-million dollar mansion in the centre of New York City.

As he dumped a pile of books onto your chest, already reeling off explanations for his choices, you stopped him and asked, “Wanna go furniture shopping?”

—

So that was how you ended up at the local branch of a Swedish furniture store on a Monday evening, about eleven hours before your next shift, decked out in a pair of ridiculous sunglasses you’d borrowed from Klaus to at least try and convince the store’s guards that you weren’t a) high, or b) drunk because of the bags under your eyes. On top of that, you had one of the most powerful people in the city tagging along behind you, currently in the process of sizing up the long room full of chairs just ahead of you as though they held the potential to kill.

“So, remind me again why we’re here?”

“You’ve never been to one of these before, which is frankly ridiculous. I need to take your IKEA virginity.”

“Don’t ever say that.”

“Also,” You said, half-laughing. “If you’re upset and you want to talk, you’ve got two options: shopping or car drive. Since neither of us have our licenses, this is our only option.”

He fell into step beside you, walking a little closer than you would have deemed necessary, but you knew it was only because he was worried for you. You weren’t looking at him, not in the face, but you could tell he was you — probably bearing one of those Sad Looks he kept in his back pocket for days like these, when someone he knew was genuinely upset.

“Okay, that’s fair. I wouldn’t have said this was our only option, though,” He trailed off, and you walked in comfortable quiet for a moment. Ahead of you, some kids belonging to a very tired-looking mother who looked to be on her own were causing chaos, and you made sure to stay well back. At eleven at night, you imagined she was probably up for murder if her kids caused her any more trouble, and you weren’t about to get involved. “So what exactly are we supposed to do here?”

“Just follow the floor-arrows. You can get anything here.”

“Anything?” He leaned in conspiratorially, making you laugh, “Food?”

“Yeah, there’s a cafeteria. They do good meatballs, apparently. But — no, stay focused. We’re here for plants.”

“Plants?” He whined.

“Plants.” You affirmed.

—

The greenhouse section of the store was small — smaller than the one you had back home — but prettily lit, almost separated from the rest of the store by walls and a ceiling that lapsed into glass halfway to let in the natural light over the city. You imagined it was prettier like this, at night, than during the day, and when you looked over at Ben, which you tended to do often, you found that he was staring upwards, too, admiring the clean polish of the stars overhead. In the winter, they showed up more frequently than in the summer, when the clear cut of haze tended to blot them out this close to the centre of the city, and you wondered if there was a place to sit. 

Ben was a naturally poetic person, inclined to to all the pretty metaphors in the world, and he paired well with this environment, surrounded by orchids and oddly-stunted bamboo plants, half-washed over by what little light there was left in the room. It was just the two of you.

You took a moment more to look at him — to let the singing demon in your chest calm — and then interrupted the quiet. 

“We’re getting you a cactus.”

“What?” He whipped around to stare at you, horrified. You found it a little amusing that somebody whose alias was literally ‘The Horror’ could be so mortified by the prospect of looking after a living thing. “I’ll kill it.”

“No, you won’t. I’ll show you how to take care of it.”

“No, I’m serious, (y/n),” He crowded around your shoulder as you browsed the little shelf of succulents to your left, ignoring him while he panicked. “I’ll kill it. I’m — I don’t have a green thumb. I don’t even have a slightly turquoise thumb. My thumb is completely black.”

“You literally have to water it once a week, it isn’t that deep. Just fucking— look,” You drew one out from the back shelf, holding it up to his nose — he stepped back as if his very proximity could cause it to wither, and you giggled. “What about this one? It looks like you.”

The cactus in question was tiny, about the size of your hand, and continued upwards in a long, thin line until flaring outwards into a nose-sized red top. It was pretty, symmetrical. He quirked an eyebrow at you incredulously.

“In what way does that look like me.”

“Oh, you know.” You trailed off, and grinned when he traced you round the corner towards another shelf you’d spotted nearby.

“No! I don’t!”

That was how most the evening passed. He followed you around the store, dutifully, complaining once and a while as if on rote, but you could tell he really was enjoying the change of scenery. Ben was one of those people who got into slumps, during which time he’d hesitate to venture out of the house; and while you could tell he was on the end of his journey through this one in particular, it took some prompting to get him out. It had been why you were so reluctant to wrap him up in a hug like you’d wanted, and vent into his shoulder about all the things that had gone wrong, not just today but in the past week or so. You didn’t want to add to his problems. 

As it turned out, you weren’t always the one who needed to take the initiative.

“So, are we going to talk about the fight?”

It had been said gently, but it made you put up your guard as if on instinct. Ben wanted to help — that was his forte, to supply aid to those who needed it, otherwise he wouldn’t have hung around Klaus for as long as he did — and you were reluctant to use that resource in your life even though he’d offered it to you many times, as if it would somehow signal that you were taking advantage of his kindness. You had too much experience with that particular feeling to want to put it on him, not when your relationship, conducted in passing, constantly a game of threading around the subject, was such a tentatively good one already.

At the same time, he wouldn’t let you get away with not answering him.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it, but I assume it wasn’t just Five and Diego that got you upset today. When you came in, you looked pretty tired.”

“Yeah, I…” You trailed off, wandering past one of those signposts which contained the maps and the weird short pencils. He tagged behind you, although he seemed to understand that you wanted space, and held back a few paces before he started to walk after you, so he could pretend it was a coincidence you were heading in the same direction. “It wasn’t really about them at all. I don’t know why I got so upset. I think I’m just a bit overwhelmed at the moment.

“Work?”

You rolled an arm out, trying to explain yourself and failing. It was getting late, in your defence, and it had been an exhausting day. “Yeah, work, also school. It’s just…”

You suddenly became aware that you were in a very public space and alerted, standing on your tip-toes so that you could check for other people. You hadn’t heard anyone — the only noise was the background buzz of elevator-type music, keeping the demons at bay — but you needed to be sure. Once satisfied, you leant back down, placing yet another miniature plant in your curled arm. 

“I don’t know. It’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid,” He said, tilting his head at you. He did this sometimes, where he seemed confused as to why you’d even say something. One of the things you loved about him — that you would never tire of — was that he was so deeply invested in the people around him, so abjectly loyal. “Come on. There’s a swinging bench over there.” He grinned at you sheepishly. “It says no sitting on it, but I don’t think there’s anyone around to check.”

—

“I don’t know,” You said again, later, curled into his arm with a series of plants in your lap. It struck you that if somebody walked by they’d assume you were in a relationship, maybe living out your tropical fantasy in a department store in the middle of the city. The thought amused you a bit; you couldn’t think of anywhere Ben would less like to be than in the middle of the wild. “This is going to sound so mean, but I just— like, I can’t listen to people talk to me about their problems anymore. I’m running out of space.”

“Right,” He said. You’d feared that he’d be reprimanding in tone, but more than anything, he just sounded softly concerned. Behind you, his heartbeat slid into the space between your shirt and your skin, warming you from the inside with the soft intention of a wood furnace. “Who is this — just, friends? Or…?”

“Friends, uh,” You pressed the sleeve of Ben’s hoodie to your eye. You hadn’t really realised you had started to cry, and wondered when it had happened. Maybe he’d realised before you had. 

You realised that, yeah, he definitely had done. Your chest swelled with something soft and odd.

“Yeah, but I don’t really mind friends. It’s just more acquaintances, or other people, or family members, like…” You sucked in a trailing breath. “My dad, my mom. My mom treats me like a psychiatrist sometimes, I hate it, she…” 

“Like, it isn’t my— it isn’t my job, you know? I know I’m, like, an adult now, and she doesn’t really find any fulfilling emotional support in my dad, but I’m still her kid, you know? It feels like I can’t talk to her about the things I get upset about — I’m always stopped at first notice, like, she’ll ignore me or something — but then I’m her receptacle for the bad stuff. It’s a really exhausting exchange, especially when I’ve already had a full day full of jackasses on my plate. Like, I can never vent, but I’ve also got to carry around the worry with me that she’ll be sad and on her own at some point, which I don’t want.”

“Have you ever talked to her about it?” He asked. He squeezed you a little tighter, somewhat hesitant, and you could hear him thinking about whether or not he was crossing some line when you both, deeply, knew whatever line that was had been surpassed some time ago. You curled closer, in amongst the ambiguous background music, in an IKEA on 96th, on a swinging bench that you weren’t technically allowed to sit on.

You’d never spoken so openly about this before, and not ever with such ease. There was something about Ben, you thought, a distilled sense of peace cutting through the lump in your throat and the panic at the edges. You’d thought, a while ago, you’d heard the demon following you along, and he had been — you could hear the places he was when he was around, living in the quiet — but here, there was nothing, even as you cried. It felt like the end of that war movie in which the protagonist showered, a catharsis. 

“I did, once,” You sniffed softly. He listened quietly. “Before I moved out, actually. We had a huge fight about it, my mom and I. My dad sort of stayed out of it, but I could tell he wouldn’t have supported me if he had gotten involved. I think they’ve got this fear, you know, that I’m not mentally well, which I’m not always, but to deal with that they try to deny it and behave as though everything’s normal, which is super invalidating.”

“It sounds it,” He said. “You talked to them since?”

You shook your head against his chest. He sighed again, just gently, letting you know.

There was a long moment of silence in which you both stared forward, not really seeing, just engaging in each other’s presence. It occurred to you, distantly, that you did want to kiss him — a feeling which seemed to be more common with each time you spent time with Ben, a sort of compulsion that came from being so unshakeably close to someone — but you didn’t. You held his hand, instead, slung over your shoulder, and let yourself calm in the time he had given you to.

When the quiet did break — a not-so-nasty sort, this time, because you were, somewhere deep down, okay — it was because of him. Looking up, you followed the direction in which he was pointing, and saw what he was referring to; a little succulent in the shape of a bell, flowering pink at the tops, the last of its kind on the shelf. It was clearly a little past its due date, but that didn’t matter. Ben unwrapped himself from you slowly and rose, cupping the little thing in his hands.

“I found my plant.”

“Cactus,” You corrected softly, watching his eyes wink with light. 

When you walked out together, two people and a little bag full of plants, you felt all the darkness recede away, as though, touched at its centre, it had recoiled away.

“I get it,” He’d said as you were halfway between your departing and your arriving. You coiled closer to hear him over the sound of a bus taking off somewhere nearby. “Why the fight upset you. And also the ‘being relied on too much’ thing. They’re just— they’re idiots, Five and Diego, but also the rest of them. It’s so tiring constantly having to put up with their shit, I know. They’re going to push everyone away who cares about them if they’re not careful.”

He’d said it with a firmness you hadn’t expected from him, and for a moment you walked in the quiet next to him, wondering how much he’d actually covered up about his siblings, how much they relied on him. You knew enough about the rest of the family to understand that for some reason, they looked at Ben as a younger sibling, even though they were all the same age; sometimes, though, you couldn’t help but think that was because they’d been taught, as superheroes and not as kids, that emotional availability was a ‘young person’ sort of thing, and Ben, out of all of them, was by far the most emotionally adept.

Eventually, when you knew he’d begun to stew, you curled your fingers around his and exhaled, looking up at the sky as you paced down the street together in the autumnal cold. “Sounds like we’re both used to taking on more than we can handle.”

He squeezed back, and you felt that something genuine had come to the pair of you for the first time. “Yeah. I think so too.”

—

“So, o great plant professor—”

“Nice alliteration.”

“—teach me your ways. How is it that I keep this creature alive?”

Ben watched over your shoulder as you patted the little thing back firmly into its pot, from which it had been dislodged by a very ceremonious and very poorly-timed trip on Ben’s part into the main road, and set it on the windowsill in the space the books he’d taken from it for you had left behind.

He’d had a praying mantis for as long as you’d known him — one of those pretty pink ones, named Riordan, you’d been told, after the author of some book series you’d never heard of — and, slipping past her enclosure on his bedside table, you grabbed the spray bottle he used to water her and brought it back, spritzing the little plant twice around its base.

“That’s all you need to do. If it’s really hot out, maybe give it that treatment twice a week rather than once, but you should be okay for a while now considering it’s almost winter.”

“Okay. And I don’t need to, like, feed it or anything?”

“No,” You said, laughing. “You don’t need to feed it.”

“Hey! I told you that I know absolutely nothing, you don’t need to rub it in.”

“I’m punishing you for your hubris.”

“What hubris?!”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Exactly how it had happened you weren’t really sure — it would be an odd explanation to the rest of the Hargreeves siblings, when you were prompted to tell them that your first kiss as a couple had been a result of you vagueing about Ben’s Shakespearean levels of arrogance (that which he did not have, making it all the more problematic to explain) — but you stood kissing him in the half-light. Behind you, something slow and elegant played on the gramophone he kept in the corner. There was a palm pressed gently to your jaw, a warmth which started in your chest and ended at the very ends of your nerves, and when you stepped back from one another, you had the uncanny feeling that something universal and nebulous had clicked into place, suddenly simple, the path in and out of the forest clarified by lamplight.

When you’d collapsed on his sofa — you sprawled across his chest, reading over his shoulder, him holding his own book over your back so that he could see it properly — he kissed the side of your jaw and said to you, “You should call them, your parents.”

You breathed out, a little shaky. “I know.”

“I’ll stay with you, if you want, while you do it. Moral support.”

“Yeah, please. That’d be really nice.” 

That ended up being a job for the next day, when you’d woken up in the filtering sunlight, slung, still, over an arm of his (which, you found out the moment he woke up, had turned dead halfway through the night). 

The phone had been heavy and cold in your hand, you remembered afterwards. Still, though, there was a warmth in it, the hand curled around yours, the legs interwoven at the end of his bed, the odd tingling to your wrist because you’d spent too long holding it up. 

It sort of stuck, that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello my lovelies!! Thank you again to everyone who's reading, and especially to those who have decided to comment!
> 
> Someone messaged me last chapter asking if I would be willing to set up a way that somebody could donate to me if they wanted to help out, and while THERE'S ABSOLUTELY NO EXPECTATION, I'll link my profile here:
> 
> https://ko-fi.com/waywarddays
> 
> I feel really sneaky doing this, so I won't ramble, but as I said don't feel obligated at all(!!). I've already been completely overwhelmed by the amount of support so far and I'm not even halfway done with my first piece on here, so I really need nothing else from any of you except the hope that you'll continue to read and find something of value in this piece. 
> 
> Everyone's favourite sexy Charlatan, next - Klaus! Stay tuned, folks 🐤


	4. iii. klaus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Klaus steals you from Vanya (who is painfully aware of your crush) for A Session after he sees you crying in his living room because of his brothers. You broach the subject of addiction with a person who's only just an ex-addict; and while the conversation is difficult, some things get uncovered because of it.
> 
> OR - Klaus being Klaus, but make it ✨ soft ✨🌟⭐️.

You emerged from Vanya’s bathroom with an odd sense of disjointedness, like her tiny box-shaped shower had been the thing connecting all your bones and your ligaments together and, without it, without the hot pressure of steam, everything floated loose inside your skin.

It was something you dealt with often, really. Less so now that you were in a better place, but still — it didn’t prevent it from being any less disconcerting when it did happen to you, an odd sort of coping mechanism that, in hindsight, seemed to do you more harm than good in the end. 

At risk of sounding angsty, there were an awful lot of things you did when you were upset that probably left you worse-for-wear in the end; but, then, you supposed that ran in the family.

The sun was coming through the great panelled window leading out onto Vanya’s balcony and you blinked through it blearily. Vanya, eying you worriedly, gestured to your clothes. She’d put them on the radiator for you, and in the background, through the still-open door of the bathroom, soft music pumped while you took them, tiredly grateful for the warmth.

“Hi,” She said tentatively. “What’s… um, what’s going on?”

“It’s nothing,” You replied on instinct, and regretted it afterwards. The question had irritated you — she’d said it as if you were going to split down the middle should she speak too loud, and you hated the idea that you might be seen as that fragile, because you weren’t — but you knew that was your fault, too. It was something psychological, you knew that, but you’d never really investigated it further about yourself; the need to avoid all conversations about your mental health, even as the quiet, weaponised and lurking, followed you around like a sword in cloth. 

Vanya was your friend, though. When you turned back to her, she was fiddling with her hands, set together in her lap, and you caught a glimpse of the person you’d first met, months ago, when she was still shy, terrified, nervous to do anything wrong. If you hated vulnerability, you hated causing it in others more.

You’d need to apologise to her, later, and made a mental note to.

“I’m going downstairs,” She said, eventually, once you’d dressed (your muscles ached; it had taken some time), laying a hesitant hand on your shoulder as she passed you by. The music still prodded away the background silence, but it rested instead of receding, stuck to all the corners like glue. “Do you need anything?”

You dreaded being alone. You wanted to lean back against the wall, curl your arms around yourself and tell it all to her, everything you were afraid of, the way the dark looked from your angle; instead, you stepped forward and wrapped her up in a hug, your skin still radiating heat from the shower.

She stiffened under your touch and relaxed. You couldn’t apologise now — not yet, when you were so close to tears already — so this would need to do. You had the feeling that she wouldn’t mind.

“No, I’m okay,” You said, hugging yourself when you peeled yourself away from her. She lay two cold hands on your wrists where they were folded in on themselves and smiled crookedly at you. “There’s takeout in the hall. You should eat before it gets cold.”

She’d opened her mouth to say something — already on the hinge of a wise-crack, or something vaguely teasing she could use to disarm the tension, a task she was so prepared for — when her bedroom door was flung open and Klaus pushed his way in, stumbling a little, one arm pressed over his eyes. 

“Ladies! Is anyone nude?”

“No, Klaus,” Vanya sighed, feigning (or possibly not — you could never really tell) exasperation as she closed her eyes. You giggled tiredly and shook your head at her dismissively when she began to apologise. 

“Brilliant,” He grinned, dropping his arm. He blinked through the light that slanted across the doorway in the mid-evening and offered that arm to you, undeterred. “Now, if you’re not bothered, Van, I’d like to steal this lovely lady away.”

You looked over at Vanya, about to raise an eyebrow at her, but she was already halfway behind Klaus making for the door. She grinned, a clipped, knowing look, and tossed you a flippant wave over her shoulder.

“I’ll leave some food for you and Klaus.”

One of the things you couldn’t stand about this family is that they all seemed to know everything. It was like being in the centre of a goddamn circuit board. Klaus peered at you through his eyelashes, and, though you weren’t really embarrassed at all, you flushed, curling your fingers around the hand he’d offered you.

—

Your first meeting with Klaus had been odd, to say the least, and drenched in enough intrigue to make it enough 

Vanya had dragged you to hers after a particularly dense week of university classes (Hell Week, as the student body had dubbed it, was an infamous and monstrous thing, referred to only in hushed, wistful tones by seniors swilling glasses of wine) to watch Orange Is The New Black, because, in her words, you weren’t a real bisexual until you’d experienced it, and you’d stumbled into the house, much like today, mid-fight.

You’d met Five before — a begrudging kid-looking fifty-year-old with a god complex and a penchant for axe-wielding, who you’d met at your coffee shop with Vanya in tow, quite literally out of the blue — so you were disappointed but not surprised to see him chasing a person across the lobby with an emergency hatchet, but what you weren’t necessarily prepared for was seeing a man wearing a skirt, a crop top and a Harley Davidson jacket parading a mannequin with one arm around. Even in the chaos, he’d found the opportunity to wink at you; and from there on out, everything had unfurled quite naturally.

You’d liked him immediately — or, at least, as much as one could like Klaus immediately (he had a number of ‘quirks’ that had definitely trespassed the point of ‘charming’, and understandably it had taken some time to get used to them) — for a good number of reasons, but particularly because he seemed one of the more honest of the Hargreeves. Everything you asked him about, whether it was why he wore dog-tags around all the time or, later on in your relationship, about his difficult relationship with his father, he answered to the best of his ability. The truth, with him, was often decorated with jokes, but that, you knew, was just a coping mechanism; he always told things as they were, though. You loved Vanya, but she’d modify things before she said them if she thought you might react poorly, and that made communication about the things that mattered difficult sometimes.

Somewhere along the road to friendship, therefore, you’d begun The Sessions. It had happened once, on a car journey back from Dallas, Texas, on a mission to kill some Commission thugs, and from there it had become a habit. You’d sat in the passenger’s seat and distracted yourself from his terrible driving by venting about that week’s fight with your parents, and, in turn, he’d professed to you that he was terrified of change because consistency, even if it was, in his case, always a bad kind, was at least predictable. And it hadn’t even been tense afterwards. He’d slapped a hand on your shoulder when you’d exited the car together, heading towards the part of the motel you’d traced Five to where there were blinking lights and trails of blood, and that was that.

Now, The Sessions tended to happen here, at the Academy. At times, you would bypass even Vanya and just venture up to his room; and from there, you’d play soft music on the old record player and talk about your issues, sat back-to-back on his fireplace rug, or maybe opposite one another on his chaise long. 

It was a good ritual. You were okay with Klaus, and he, you hoped, felt that he was okay with you, too.

“Now, I have no blankets this week, because Allison’s playing mother and doing laundry, but—” He raised a finger at you, eyebrows in his hairline, once you’d crossed into his room, “—I do have some very luxurious coats. Could I perchance tempt you?”

“If you would, good sir, I’d appreciate it.” You played along with the bit, and he tossed you a heavy, soft-furred winter coat, which you held up in front of you. It was massive. You wondered, distantly, with some confusion, whether it was Luther’s. 

“I know what you’re thinking,” He hummed. “Don’t you worry, they’re not monkey-man’s. I stole these from rehab.”

“I’m not sure that’s better?”

He shrugged, a grin playing at the edge of his lips. After a moment’s hesitation, you tossed it around your shoulders and lifted your arms, entertained by the sheer size of it. It hung off of you in loops. If you lowered your arms, it’d probably fall off.

“Looks brilliant.” He snorted, but his wasn’t much better; split into cross-stitches down the side and an awful leopard-print colour, you couldn’t help but wonder if that one was one of his, because you couldn’t imagine tough street-thugs even laying a hand on that thing. 

“You look like a pimp.” You deadpanned, watching him as he threw himself onto his couch and lay belly-up on the cushions. He drew his arm across his forehead dramatically and you laughed. “Actually, I’m feeling Dutch prostitute.”

“Komm zu mir, meine Schätzchen.” He wailed, fluttering his eyelashes at you. You quirked an eyebrow at him, stepping over with your arms folded over your chest to keep your coat on your body.

“You know Dutch?”

He snickered. “I think that’s German, actually.” 

You watched him and realised backwardly that he’d done that magic thing again, which was to distract you. It was a skill he employed so easily that it sometimes worried you, the mark of a conman; at the same time, though, the buzzing sense of being followed, the long shadows which had traced you across the hall from Vanya’s bedroom, seemed to be held at bay at the door, their efforts frustrated. 

As he outstretched his arms towards you, summoning you melodramatically, you let yourself ease a bit. “Come, come.”

“Mmh.” You mumbled, and settled over top of him where he was now half-sitting, half-lying, so that he could play with your hair. It was something that kept those moving fingers occupied, and for you, the human contact was nice, so you weren’t ever really opposed to sitting like this, although recently, it had become different, more intimate.

Five — a man (Boy? Man? You never really knew.) who you would never stop believing knew everything — had raised an eyebrow at you once when he’d walked in on the pair of you in this position on the long couch downstairs. Later, he’d asked you ‘what that had been about’, and let his brows rise a little too much when you’d responded that it wasn’t like that. You’d flushed, and been irritated by the assumption, but at the same time, you’d said yourself how little you cared to tell other people, and yet it came so easily when you were with Klaus.

Sure, you knew you could have trusting platonic relationships. You’d had many in your life. But this wasn’t that. 

Not at all.

“So,” He sighed, with the same force of strength as though he was overturning a rock. You supposed that he was, in a way. “Five and Diego, huh? What assholes.”

“Yeah,” You said quietly. He threaded his hands through your hair and you tried to let yourself relax into the sensation.

“I’m sorry I didn’t step in sooner.”

“That wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have cried in front of everybody. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Not to them, maybe, but they’re batshit like the rest of us. Not everybody needs to act as witness for the jury of— judgy-ness.”

“Nice.”

“Thanks.” You sniffled a laugh.

“Five said that you shouldn’t have overreacted once you left, which I’m only telling you because that’s the tell that he knows he shouldn’t have said what he said. Get ready for an awkward and possibly-psychopathic apology tomorrow. Be prepared, because it might not sound like one.” He huffed a laugh. You hummed, smiling tiredly in spite of yourself. It eased you to know that he’d recognised what he’d done. One of your worst fears was being looked at as hyper-sensitive, something which Klaus knew a lot about and had likely told you to prevent you feeling bad about it. 

That had been a surprise, too, upon getting to know him. He was, deeply, a good person. 

You were vaguely aware that a thin tension had arisen in the air, stiffening it. It seemed to rear its head nearly every time you did this, now. Neither of you acknowledged it.

“Was there something else behind all this?” Klaus pried gently. 

You exhaled. This hadn’t really been something you wanted to tell him; especially not when he was doing so well with his sobriety journey. He’d been clean for five and a half months at this point, and the last thing you wanted to do was guilt him for something he hadn’t even done.

“My dad’s back in hospital.” 

The hands in your hair stilled. You lifted your hand to rub at your nose, mostly to avoid looking him in the eyes. 

“Overdose.”

A slow wick of silence burned between the pair of you. Just when you were beginning to worry your lip, he said, “Ah.”, and despite trying, you couldn’t unpick its intention. He could be unreadable too, if he so desired.

“Is he okay?” He asked eventually, low-voiced. You blinked wearily, and recognised the familiar press of guilt against your chest.

“He’ll live, yeah.”

Your father was classic among his brand of people, a slow-hearted man in and out of rehab for his entire life. He’d spent the first few years of your life, you were told, sworn off of drugs — until he’d been busted for holding cocaine under the floorboards of your family’s living room and had been held in a rehabilitation institution for six years as a part of his plea to avoid jailtime. You’d spent a good amount of your kid life without him, and to this day, you had a complicated relationship with your father. You were worried from a daughter’s perspective for him, but not from a necessarily loving one. That was the reality, no matter how harsh it sounded. You weren’t prepared to forgive him for disappearing just because he ‘loved you’.

There were some things you had yet to tell Klaus. Your father’s past addiction habits weren’t one of them — and, a few months before he’d decided to sober up, that had been a difficult conversation to have — but the fact that he was still on drugs, quite severely, had been. 

“Sorry,” You said, scrubbing your wrist over your eyes. “I don’t know why I even brought it up—”

“Hey, hey, hey,” He touched slender fingers to the side of your face, successfully prying your arm away, and when you met his eyes, you found them fixed on you, though they weren’t quite smiling with the rest of his face. There was a heavy conflict in them that you felt the urge to look away from. “It’s fine.” You got the sense it wasn’t, but he settled a hand on your cheek and you let him convince you of it. “I’m not that fragile. Is that what that was all about? The tears?”

You nodded, hot pressure behind your eyes. He curled forward, wrapping both arms, drenched in leopard print, around your front in an awkward-semi-hug, and, still in tears, you sniffle-laughed, returning it as best you could.

“It’s just,” You continued, voice fractured. “I don’t know, I know it’s really weird and paranoid, but every time he does this, y’know, I’m reminded that our family, we’re historically addicts. And my dad, he does it to get out of his own head, because it sucks in there, and I—”

You trailed off, breathing quickly, but Klaus seemed to understand, brows cinched a little in the centre of his head in a sober sort of understanding. “You’re worried you’re going to go down the same route.”

“It’s really weird, I know, but it’s just— like, he does it to get out of his head, and I struggle, so much, and I’m terrified all the time I’m on my own, and I know that if I ever drink anything, or I take anything, even by accident, that’s going to be it. And I don’t wanna— I don’t wanna do that to the people I love, you know?”

You cried into your hand, and Klaus hovered overhead, silent, thumbing at your palm. It guilted you that you had made him like this — quiet, thoughtful, unmoving — but at the same time it was cathartic to get it out to someone who did know, deeply, probably more than you did. 

Klaus had told you a little about why he’d first started to get sober, on the first week you’d visited him after his decision, when he was in the throes of full-body shivers and vomiting. You’d sat next to him near his bathroom, rubbing his back, and had distracted him by asking him about his goals, trying to motivate him. He’d told you all of it: about Dave; about his dad, and not being able to contact him after he’d died, when the family had needed him most; about the people he’d hurt and left in the ruins in order to fuel his addiction. It was a story you knew well, but you’d believed it more from him than you had with anyone you’d heard it from before, even and especially your father, because you knew the consequences of sobriety for him went a lot longer past some shivering and some nausea. 

He’d told you about the morgue, the days he’d spent trapped in it. The fact that he could hear the voices all the time he wasn’t drunk or high or out of it. You couldn’t imagine what that was like, to be forced to listen to dead people all your life; but you related to it in the sense that he was terrified of the things inside his own head. 

(What you wouldn’t tell him, not for years afterwards, when you had a house and a dog in West Texas together, was that you’d had a similar reaction to what he’d said then to what you were having now. You’d looked at him and for the first time seen yourself.)

So you knew he’d get it, even if it made him uncomfortable to listen to. 

And when he said to you what he said, clear as day, eyes lit up by the half-light of evening, something universal seemed to accept it as the truth.

“It won’t happen to you,” Klaus said, smiling vaguely, as if he knew it for certain. 

You blinked at him. “You don’t know that.”

“Oh,” He laughed, a little humourlessly as he studied you, fingers tracing upside down along your jawline. You took his hand because it felt like the right thing to do. “I do know that, actually.”

“You— how?”

“Because, darling, look at you,” He smiled at you, eyes creasing at the corners. “You’re terrified.”

When you’d first met Klaus, as he winked at you in the path of a hatchet, the first thing you’d noticed were his eyes, the way he considered everything around him before he swept past, flamboyant, with faux ease. You’d learned during this time, in fact, that the most honest part of him was the way in which he looked at things, because he found it more difficult to control the facade there than anywhere else. Now, a dark gold-azure in the evening, you let them freeze you and mine from you the things which were taking control of you until they were there in front of you, in the space between his hands and yours, shattered into pieces.

“I can see it. People leave behind the drug route because the fear outweighs the high or because of intense happiness. I know from experience,” He offered you a lilted smile, and you caught sight of the last couple letters of his left hand tattoo as he waved the pair of them over your face melodramatically. You couldn’t decipher whether or not he was referring to being scared, like you were, or being happy; you had a feeling that with him, it had been a mix of the two that’d forced him out of his habits. “People go into them in the first place not to escape fear, but to escape the things they’re scared of. To take drugs to escape taking drugs? I don’t think that’s how that works.”

You sniffed, twisting around clumsily in his arms — when you elbowed him in the chest accidentally, mid-turnover, he complained loudly and you laughed, suddenly face-to-face with him, sprawled out across his chest.

(You half-wanted Five to walk in just to see his face. However adult he claimed to be, disgust looked hilariously child-like on him.)

“And if I do, though?” You whispered carefully, searching him. He picked up your hand with his and traced shapes into its palm (letters, you realised later. He was drawing his own tattoos, a feat so inexplicably intimate that it overpowered any of the embarrassment you felt being so close to him. “What if I fall down that route? My dad did.”

He smiled, drew his hand across his face. “Then I’ll help you out,” Then he snorted, curling into himself in a way that made you want to pull him into a pocket dimension and never let him go. “Let’s be honest, I have the experience.”

And he would have probably laughed more, with that half-amount of crazy, had you not glanced down at his lips before he had the chance to close his eyes and miss it. But he didn’t miss it, and he did lean up to press his mouth to yours, and something did diffuse in the room — distant, like a tension, something that had been made with the intention of eventually breaking down. 

“Klaus,” You half-whispered when he pulled away to twist his head to the size. Those eyes found yours and you took a breath. “Friends don’t do this.”

“No,” He said, and his gaze dropped to your mouth again. “I suppose they don’t.” He returned to eye contact, if a little reluctantly, and raised an eyebrow, his mouth curling into a smirk. “Wanna stop?”

“Absolutely not.”

—

“So what is it in your head?” He asked you later, considerably more dishevelled. The scruff of his hair fell down across his neck, still unshaved from his time in the sixties, and you wanted to tell him to never, ever get rid of it. Klaus with long hair was quite literally a godsend. 

He was doing that thing with your palm again, tattooing you with his fingers. “What’s making you sick?”

“It’s…” You breathed in and winced, hearing it in the back there for the first time in a few hours, buzzing away. Behind Klaus, you imagined a demon rear, sizing you up from the doorway. ”…I can’t deal with it. The quiet.”

“Huh,” He laughed softly. “Sometimes I wish it was quieter up here in the old thinktank. Ghosts are surprisingly loud.” He tapped the side of his head with his forefinger, and surged forward to kiss you once more, just chastely, just enough, saying conspiratorially, “What a pair we are, huh?”

“I won’t let you deal with that again,” You said firmly, uncertain of how you were going to make that come true, but it felt like the right thing to say and you were too overwhelmed not too. Several different emotions flitted across those eyes, changing the look of them until they settled on something soft and molten liquid-y, gold-tinted. “Make sure you talk to me about it. Tell me what they say to you and we can deal with it together.”

“Sure,” He agreed, voice splintering. “It’ll beat back the quiet for you.”

“Klaus! (y/n)! If I come in there and you’re on top of each other — in any sense of the word — I swear to god, I will dismember both of you with a battleaxe.”

You fell into giggles and Klaus snorted over your head, nodding at you to get up and get changed as he scrambled to find his shirt amidst the ruffles of his bedsheets. “I told you, didn’t I? Psycho apology time.”

“Five!! I’m coming! Don’t come in—”

“Augh—!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wowowow this one made me emotional
> 
> I listened to this interview with Robert Sheehan once in which he explained that Klaus was an entirely selfish being and that was why it was so interesting to put him in a position where he fell in love and had to do something for someone else for the first time. I think that's a really interesting concept to explore and tried to do that here, but it may have just come off as incoherent rambling (whatever you may believe, I don't edit these!!) since I love love love his character so much.
> 
> Klaus stans, come get y'all juice 🌈✌🏼💲
> 
> Also, next up, although I'm not sure anybody's as excited about this one as they are with the others - Allison! I'm trying to challenge myself by writing characters I don't really have a good read on yet (I still feel like there's a lot left to do with Allison's character before she becomes 'complete'), but I love her nonetheless and think she'd have a good few cents to say if the reader was ever upset, especially if she was close to you already. 
> 
> As always, a link to buy me a coffee, if you feel you want to: 
> 
> https://ko-fi.com/waywarddays
> 
> 15% of everything donated will go to the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+-based mental health organisation I really love, and the rest will go to uni fees, so thanks so much for any support! You can also secure a free commission if you donate any amount, and you can commission some of my art. Love y'all!! 🐤🌈


	5. iv. allison

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You and Allison walk to your apartment, and then take an excursion. You've never really talked about your problems before, not like this; so unsurprisingly, it's a learning experience for all parties involved.
> 
> tw: There's a mention of a homophobic slur here by the abbreviation 'x-slur', but the slur itself is not actually mentioned. Its use happens in hindsight.

You got changed, seething, and, like a dragon thick with scales, the quiet followed you around the room. The shower had been cathartic — something you’d needed since the day first began, really — but the sound of the water falling had hardly been enough to push out the blunt force of your train of thoughts and after a while, the tiles had begun to swarm in front of your eyes. You’d stared at them so long that shampoo had fallen into your eyes — and it wasn’t even the nice, expensive kind that Vanya sometimes treated herself to, so, eyes stinging, you’d cried again, fisting your hands in the towel you used to wipe your face off in frustration.

It had been some time since it had gotten this bad. 

Your body felt wayward, light, but not in an easy-breezy way; a kind of weightlessness that made you feel like you weren’t there at all, taking up space in the shoebox bedroom belonging to your friend, but were instead something nebulous, a swarm of bees, shifting angrily in the light of the day’s end.

It brought you back to that space in the dark: the living room with three doors and no windows; your parents, standing; your mother, hand pressed over her mouth; the corners of the room closing inwards: and then to the little sliver of walk room behind the counter at your work, how the face of your assailant had looked exactly the same as your father’s when you’d first opened up to them, the pairing of obvious confusion and the lack of desire to understand. 

Today had been a rough day for a number of reasons, but that had been the definite low point, now paired alongside crying in the shower for ‘rock bottom’ moments in your short life so far. Slurs weren’t anything to joke about; especially not when they were used like they’d been intended to be used, to your face, in front of an audience.

Your body hurt. You wanted to go to bed.

You rounded the door as if in sleep. The ends of your body felt heavy and disconnected, as if they slurred into the space around you, and, treading quietly, you listened to the distant sounds of Five and Diego downstairs, still shouting but clearly attempting to be quieter. If that was their mercenary attempt at making amends with you now that they’d heard you emerge from Vanya’s room, they were failing. There were few things worse than a sense of humiliation, and you’d been subjected to it twice — crying once before a café’s worth of your customers, and once more in front of the few friends you had left who’d never actually seen you do it.

You turned as you shut the door to the sound of footsteps.

The thought that Allison, in particular, had seen you in tears mortified you — but the backwards slant to her eyebrows, cinched in the centre of her forehead, the way she touched the swirling stop of the staircase’s wooden banister, it found in you a terrifying sense of vulnerability, and you felt a lump rise again in your throat. You’d always had a closer relationship with her than with any of her other siblings (on a bad day, you sometimes thought you were closer to her than you were to Vanya, even, secret and withdrawn as she was) — part of that was probably a joint sense of imposter syndrome and the fact that you were both recently out as bi — but she was still impressive and beautiful, the prodigy in a family full of them, and you felt, constantly, the need to lean up to her level. Usually, it was enjoyable, spending time in your workplace’s bathroom before you came over touching up your makeup, or coordinating your outfits before meeting up with her, but the thought exhausted you, now.

She raised her hand, waving gingerly, and there was a distant pain in it for you, flaring up at the back of your brain. “Hey.” She said, managing a smile.

“Hi,” You pulled your coat — actually, Vanya’s coat, a little too small (you always forgot how tiny she actually was) — around yourself like it held the power to conceal how terrible you probably looked. You wondered if your eyes were still red. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s fine, no,” She waved her hand dismissively, that pretty smile widening, and it irritated you, even when you were sure, like you always were, that she hadn’t meant to cause any harm. “We all have those days.” Allison was hugely important, and carried herself like she was at all times, though she didn’t necessarily always need to — as a result, she was difficult to talk to about actual day-to-day issues. She kept herself hidden away and you had the feeling when you’d hung out with her before that she expected others to do the same, even if it wasn’t a conscious thing. The shit about your parents, your struggles, anything — you still hadn’t shared all of that with her, having known her now for about a year. It always felt like the wrong time to bring it up.

“So,” She said, clapping her hands together. “I thought that we could maybe watch a movie, if that would make you feel better? Take your mind off of it? Or, if that doesn’t work, I was actually going to reorganise the library before you came around, so if you want something more practical—?”

“Actually, Allison,” You averted your eyes, staring down the cloisters at the commotion in the drawing-room. (Was it a drawing room? A living room? A bar? You never really knew.) “I think I’m actually just going to go.”

“What, like, right now?” 

You stepped past her onto the staircase and followed it down to the lobby, avoiding her careful stare even as she trailed behind you, a few steps lagging. “That’s fine if you want to, but, you know you don’t have to, right?”

“No, I know.” Five and Diego came into view pretty quickly, shrouded in a blueish haze which you assumed was residue from Five teleporting around too ambitiously, their surroundings pinpricked by knives. You weren’t surprised to have seen it had gotten physical in the end — whatever they were talking about, this ‘ex-girlfriend’ you’d never heard anything of before, sounded pretty serious — but that didn’t mean you wanted to see it, and you shut the doors fairly pointedly. “I just need a walk.”

“You probably shouldn’t try and go too far, though,” You turned to meet her eye, finally, and felt your chest press in guiltily at the amount of concern you could see in her face. She glanced down at the watch clipped around her wrist and nodded, turning towards the Academy’s front doors hesitantly. “It’s really late. New York’s not safe at night.”

“I know that,” You could feel yourself bristling. “I live here, too. I can take care of myself.”

She opened her mouth, a little surprised at your outburst, and closed it again, unreadable.

That was the other thing about Allison. You found it was the case with all of her family members, but with her you probably noticed it more just because you were around her so often, toeing the line between this and ‘something more’ — she had been raised with a hero complex and it stuck with her even in the most ordinary or mundane situations, and it meant that she babied you when she had the opportunity to. It had been sweet at first, and still was, at times, when you did actually need her help; but you thought back to what you’d said to Five, about not treating people like children, and ran a hand through your hair frustratedly.

But she meant well. She always did. So instead, you said, quietly, “Sorry.”, and turned towards where you’d left your shoes. 

“No, it’s…” Something shattered in the drawing-living-bar-room. “It’s okay. I didn’t realise…” She sucked in a breath, and, pulling the heel of your shoe up from where it had been crushed in earlier, you raised an eyebrow at her tiredly as she glanced back into the house, then to you, then back to the house again, deciding. 

She turned back to you, finally, sighing softly. Blue light from under the doors flashed quickly across her eyes. “Are you okay if I come with?”

“Oh— you don’t, you don’t have to, Allison, if you don’t want,” You started, raising your hands, but she had already made for the long line of coats behind your head, and patted you on the shoulder to get you to move aside, rifling through them until she found hers. She shrugged it over her shoulders, grinning.

“I don’t want to bother you. But I’ll walk you back if you’d like some company?”

“Um,” You relaxed a little, just about managing a smile, and she lit up at that, pulling on her coat the rest of the way. “Yeah, sure. That would be nice.”

“Cool. Also,” She waved her finger at Vanya’s overcoat and you looked down at yourself, perplexed. The tension had disappeared, but you wondered what it was about you that had managed to get her to put on her ‘I’m fixing this’ face. “Take that thing off and borrow one of mine.”

She lowered her voice as she handed you a black coat you dreaded to think was designer, conspiratorial, and you laughed properly this time. “Vanya wears it all the time, and one day I’m going to burn it.”

—

The street opened up for people like Allison. In the heart of the city like you were now, celebrities were fairly common, so they walked pretty freely around, rarely stopped or hassled unless they were actively in an event’s attendance, but even those who didn’t recognise Allison Hargreeves from her acting pursuits seemed to sway out of her way if they could. Her confidence was part of it, you were sure, but there was something particular to famous people — their put-togetherness, their unique stylism, like they were handling every moment with dignity — that made them recognisable even if one couldn’t quite put a name to a face. Normally, you would have teased her about it, but tonight, in the dark, when the world seemed unpredictable if you were on your own, you were happy to let her influence protect you. 

Anyway, you couldn’t help but feel safe when you were around Allison. It wasn’t like you’d get mugged around her — she could rumour any assailant to turn a gun on themselves, after all — but even if that wasn’t a factor, she’d said to you once, very seriously (although admittedly when she was a little wine-drunk), that she’d always protect you. That moment with her sat warmly in your heart for a good long while afterwards.

“There was only one umbrella,” She said disdainfully, then added in a laugh, “Ironically. I don’t know what Pogo does with the rest of them. We’ll have to share, I hope you don’t mind.“

Under the thick guise of the coat you’d been lent — which you’d found out soon after, much to your abject horror, was Louis Vuitton — you hadn’t even noticed that it was coming down, but, stretching your hand out in front of you, you could feel the heavy droplets of rain, almost snow in the autumn cold but not quite yet. It was an unpleasant sort of storm, the kind that would have chilled the back of your neck if you had gone out as you were; you were still pretty in your own head, and the dark followed you along by a couple of paces’ difference, but you were grateful that Allison was as kind as she was. She could have easily left you by the door if you’d snapped at her, considering she didn’t even know that that was a coping mechanism of yours (you were, after all, not on speaking terms about things like that quite yet), but she hadn’t done. You wondered if that was Vanya’s doing. She and you were very similar — you lashed out in moments of crisis, and you’d noticed when you were getting to know Vanya that Allison was incredibly forgiving about that sort of thing.

She pushed the umbrella up and over your heads and you crowded into her side, humming contentedly. She said nothing more about it, but you could tell it had eased her, having you accept her offer, and you trudged along side-by-side in the sleet.

“Your life is in a constant state of rom-com,” You teased, tapping the handle of the umbrella. She rolled her eyes dramatically.

“I know. I feel like every time I drop something I need to be careful not to touch hands with anyone as they lean down delicately and ask if I’m okay. I’ve triggered enough American homecoming movies in my lifetime.“

“A luxury,” You pointed out, and she scoffed, grinning.

“Hardly. You have no idea how many men have done that and assumed they’re ‘the one’.” She punctuated her sentence with a show of cynical jazz hands and you giggled, lightening a little. She was, deeply, funny, not ever given the chance to shine really when she was bracketed by Klaus’ and Ben’s more rudimentary humour; it was one of the things you really enjoyed about her as a person.

“You’ve got to start dropping things around women.“

Allison had told you that she was hoping her next partner would be a woman sometime in the dead of night when you’d last stayed over, in hushed tones spoken over a glass of rosé. She’d sounded weirdly conspiratorial about it, like she wasn’t allowed to say it out loud, which had struck you as odd at the time, considering she was possibly a part of one of the most unexpectedly tolerant families in the world — but, looking at the way she turned away, smile not quite hitting her eyes, it hit you that the problem was probably the press. Allison was out to you and to the rest of her family by now; not to her coworkers, though, and certainly not to rest of the world, and, realistically, you wondered if she’d ever make that final step. There seemed to be a disconnect between her and her career: as if the acting world wanted to unpick her to the very core, and she, a fundamentally private person, would never give that luxury of information to them.

The thought that she possibly saw you as an outsider akin with those paparazzi goons, and therefore wasn’t sharing herself with you now that you knew each other properly, crossed your mind for the first time. It hurt something integral to you, and you wanted to say something to her about it, but it felt weird, still, with the crack between you.

“I suppose I do need to do that.” She said, albeit lately. You supposed that was an improvement.

You were turning the corner onto Bleeker Street, now, and it struck you that you were heading home without actually meaning to. You’d really been following Allison. She was still about a pace ahead of you, staring off in that determined way into the parting crowds ahead of her, and you wondered if she’d really been over enough times already to navigate her way to your apartment without the help of a phone or GPS system. You’d thought it’d only been a couple times so far, at most three — and even then she’d always been driven by chauffeur, showing up on your curb with expensive wine and attracting the attention of more than a few of your neighbours — but you guessed it had to be more if she knew the way by foot already.

There was a strict tension, now. Tired, still, you wanted to leave it alone; but you wanted something, anything, from her more, so much that you were willing to leave that exhaustion behind.

“I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable,” You eventually settled on, careful to set a few inches of distance between your arms. She glanced down at you, wide-eyed at being caught off-guard, and then reached up with her spare hand to tuck the hair in her eyes back behind her ear.

“No, you didn’t. Sorry, I know I was being weird.” You sensed there was something more, so you pressed your mouth into a firm line and waited. Finally, she said, “What I said to you — about wanting a girlfriend, or something…“

“I didn’t think you’d remember.“

“I wasn’t that drunk,” She elbowed you in the shoulder, faux-glaring, and you laughed, avoiding it as best you could on the narrow street corner. A man in sweatpants glared at you as you narrowly stepped past him and Allison, not surprisingly at all, glared back. “Yeah, I remember.“

You hummed. “Did you, like, not mean it, or something?“

“No—! No, I meant it. I meant it. I just… it’s really difficult, there’s a lot going on at work, and I don’t know if I could…“

She took a moment to breathe, and, glancing up, you came face-to-face with the door of your apartment, bracketed, as it usually was, by piles of stuffed bin-bags. She looked up at you and followed your eyes, and it looked like she was also pretty startled to see you’d made it home.

She patted your arm, hoisting the umbrella up using her other hand, and smiled sheepishly, gesturing across the road towards the entrance to a greenspace park you’d once had a picnic at together. “Let’s— take the scenic route?“

—

“Right,” You said, shoulder-to-shoulder with her. The long stretches of grass were split down the centre by the curve of a smooth-stone path, and you walked next to her, barefoot because she’d been wearing heels, hands overlapping on the handle of the umbrella. “So it’s just, like, an industry thing?“

“Yeah, I mean, I think so,” She sighed, looking up at the thin layer of trees overhead. The leaves would normally mask the sky — that was how it had been when you’d visited together in the summer — but by now, in late autumn, they’d shed most of them, so the branches gave way to clawfuls of black sky, and, if you squinted, you could see the stars. The light of them flickered in the water of a nearby pond, and instead of staring and making Allison uncomfortable, you watched the smooth way it trickled left, in a long line past about a mile’s worth of faux forestry. “Most of the directors are old male guys, and they’re not always, like, intolerant, but they can be a lot of the time. I really have to be careful what I say and to who.“

“So you haven’t— come out to any of your coworkers? Not even the ones you’re close to?“

She shook her head, smiling thinly. Uncertain of what to do, you touched her shoulder, and she stared at the place of contact for a long time. You got the sense she wasn’t really seeing it, though.

“That sucks, Allison,” You breathed. Something new and painful in the back of your brain brought you back to three o’clock in your coffee shop, the miles’ worth of metre between you and that awful customer; how deeply small it had made you feel, to be stared at, and not seen, by clusters of the people you’d just served while they hadn’t known. “Really.“

“Yeah,” She said quietly. “I miss walking around and just being, like, carefree, you know?” And then, as if she’d remembered, she turned to you quickly, startling you. “But—! I’m being selfish. This little excursion wasn’t supposed to be about me. I wanted to ask you what happened earlier. Like, apart from the fight.” She laid a hand on your wrist and you tensed a little, thankful she probably wouldn’t notice in the light conditions. “I was worried. You seemed really on-edge even when you walked in.“

You were come up on the rounded edge of the lake, where the path sort of curled around, splitting off in a couple directions, and you stared at the thin white gildings of the water, suddenly so tired your bones ached. When you’d agreed to go off with Allison, it had been under the premise of helping her out with whatever seemed to be bugging her — but you, deeply, just wanted to leave this day behind, or get back to bed and get the overthinking over and done with. Maybe you’d take another shower.

And you would have said ‘No, I’m okay.’ if you hadn’t met Allison Hargreeves; hadn’t known she’d press until there was nothing left of your resolve, until you could get it all off of your chest. It wasn’t like you two specifically talked about your emotions, but that was the way her family rolled. You’d been around Vanya for long enough to know that they liked to get things into the open air so they were easier to kill off.

“It’s fine,” You said, and before she could protest, you continued. “It wasn’t really the fight that upset me. I was— uh. Overreacting, probably.“

“Hardly. Five and Diego…” She stared at the sky, gaze hard. You dreaded being in their shoes when she returned home later. “They’re so insensitive. They’ve always been like that, though, so if it helps, you’re not alone on the list of ‘people Five and Diego have pissed off-slash-upset.’“

“I know,” You ran a hand over your face. “It was more just the addition of that to everything else.“

“What was ‘everything else’?“

You closed your eyes and saw the face of the woman, the way her eyes looked black in the dim lighting overhead the pastry counter. “A lot of schoolwork. A woman at work called me a slur.“

Allison stopped beside you and you lagged, slowing a few paces ahead of her until you paused, too. You turned back, staring at her feet, and she surged forward to clasp both your hands in hers, umbrella placed delicately so that it leant up against her calf. The sleet fell harder than ever.

“She said what?“

“Yeah,” Your throat hurt, and you swallowed in a vain attempt to get rid of the rising feeling of helplessness clawing at the insides of your chest, the things behind you which had followed you even here, out to the places you rarely went to, daring to come close even when you were with company. “It was shit.“

“What did she say to you?“

“I think she saw the badge on my apron,” You swallowed tightly. “She called me the f-slur. It wouldn’t have been as bad but we were basically at capacity. It felt like—” You could feel your shoulders bunching and stopped, breathed in. “—I know it’s silly, she couldn’t have hurt me, but it felt like I was in danger. Took me back to when I was still living with my parents.“

“That’s—” She didn’t continue for a long moment, and you pursed your lips, eyes hot around the edges. It felt like a confession to say this to her, when you’d only just breached the point of talking about anything to do with your problems about half an hour ago; but it was oddly cathartic to have her react like this, as if she couldn’t understand why anyone would ever say anything like that to you. “—I’m so sorry.“

“Don’t be,” You sniffled, and drew your arm across your eyes. The hood of her jacket fell away from your face a little and you were distantly mortified that she was seeing your crying-face for the second time in one day. “I’m— it just shocked me. I was used to that where I used to live — small towns — but I didn’t expect— not here.” She squeezed your fingers in hers, and you squeezed back, laughing a little. “I guess I was just being naïve, though.“

“I wish I could have been there to protect you.“

You shook your head, meeting her eyes. You’d expected to see murder, but mostly she just seemed profoundly terrified for you, and it was validating, really, for the most part. Standing with her at near-eleven at night, in the dark, two women on your own in NYC, you shouldn’t really have felt safe, and you didn’t; but you felt more safe than you had done for the rest of the day. 

You shook your head again. “What would you have done, Allison?“

“I would have—” She stopped herself, and started again, moving her grip up to your wrists. You stared at her hands, pale around the knuckles because of the way she was holding onto you. “—I’d have said something, at least.“

“Said what?“

“I heard a…” She let go of one of your arms and rolled her wrist to elaborate, stopping just short of that magical phrase. You quirked an eyebrow at her.

“At the risk of ruining your reputation?“

She paused, blinking. Then, firmly, she said, “Yes. For you? Of course.“

You weren’t really sure what to say to that. You’d just had a conversation about how critical it was for her to maintain her image, and while that image was almost completely false, supplied by a dry piping system of information from her actual life, you knew it was important to her; so the idea that she’d drop it all just for you seemed ludicrous, and then, after that had passed fleetingly, deeply intimate. It made you flush — you could feel your ears warming in the biting midnight cold.

Eventually, you let go of her, curling your arms around yourself in a makeshift hug. “Thank you.“

Her arms fell back to her side and she lowered her eyebrows at you, as if you had nothing at all to thank her for, when you felt, now more than ever, than this was one of the most genuinely kind things anyone had ever done for you. Even if she, you know, hadn’t actually done it.

(You had no doubt that she would have, though, if she’d been there, and the demon who’d been following you about, waiting for you to have a moment to yourself, had no idea what to do with that information.)

“Of course. You don’t deserve that.“

“You don’t deserve the treatment you’re getting, either.” You responded firmly, and she smiled, the receding sort that carried with it a lilt of circumstantial despair. 

“No, I don’t.“

—

You walked back together mostly in the silence. Earlier, the prospect of a space without noise in it seemed terrifying, full of things which could go wrong; but it was comfortable, and the distance between you was small enough to prevent anything from intervening and reestablishing that space. Something universal and nebulous had moved, signifying the beginning of something between the pair of you, and you let it hover there under the umbrella she’d put back up (quite uselessly, considering you were both soaked, now), white-bright and wavering.

Quietly, she shifted grip so that she carried the handle with her outside hand and, before you could ask, you felt her fingers, warm despite the cold, twist around yours. 

She released a shaking breath and, leaving behind one of your own, you squeezed. 

“It’s hard,” You said quietly.

“It’s hard.” She agreed, squeezing back.

The pair of you stared straight ahead as you came up closer to the gate you’d entered from. It had only been about an hour’s worth of walking together, but the sheer magnitude of what you’d achieved meant it could have been days since you’d last seen your apartment. It was still there, though, forested by trashbags, with the lights on in the inside hallway, and as you stepped out onto the street, you let go of her hand (more than a little regretfully) to fish around in your pockets for your keys.

She stayed on the lower step while you unlocked the door. When you turned around, she was already looking at you, and you glanced inside, checking the lobby for any loiterers before you looked back at her, one eyebrow raised and smiling.

“So, uh,” She tilted her head at you, but you could see some suspicion of what you were going to ask turning the edges of her mouth up. “You wanna come up? Watch a movie?”

She folded the umbrella in on itself — you’d only just realised it was embroidered with the Academy’s logo — and followed your path up the steps. “I mean, it’s too late to let you go home, and—“

Before she stepped past you into your building, she pressed a kiss to your jawline, effectively silencing you. Suppressing a grin, she slipped past you, and, a little out of it, you closed the door behind her, just barely glancing up in time to see her toss a look at you over her shoulder from the staircase to the second floor.

“I’m thinking Bohemian Rhapsody.“

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TELL ME WHY THIS WAS SO FUN TO WRITE
> 
> I was terrified to finish this because I didn't want to get this one wrong, but wow, Allison is fun to write! I went into this with no plan at all and came out with something I'm really proud of. I'm hoping you all enjoy it! 
> 
> We've got Diego next, then Five! Very excited to begin to explore the actual 'fight' side of all this, since I think Five and Diego have some apologising to do.
> 
> My Kofi, just in case you want to help support me: https://ko-fi.com/waywarddays

**Author's Note:**

> I think the logical step is to start with Vanya, isn't it?


End file.
